Investing in Ex Ante Regulation: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Patent Examination
研究了专利局通过增加审查员时间来提高药品二次特征专利质量的效果，发现当前时间分配导致审查员在边际上发放低质量二次专利，并评估了扩大事前审查的收益与成本。
We explore how the Patent Office may improve the quality of issued patents on "secondary" drug features by giving examiners more time to review drug-patent applications. Our findings suggest that current time allocations are causing examiners to issue low quality secondary patents on the margin. To assess the merits of expanding ex ante scrutiny of drug-patent applications at the agency, we set forth estimates of the various gains and losses associated with giving examiners more time, including reduced downstream litigation costs and added personnel expenses, along with both the static gains and dynamic innovation losses associated with earlier generic entry.