Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO
研究美国专利商标局为无法律代表的申请人提供额外帮助的随机对照试验，发现女性发明人团队通过审查员修正案成功谈判，获得专利的概率比男性高12个百分点以上，表明额外援助可缩小专利性别差距。
Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across inventor gender, driven primarily by an increase in successful negotiations by women inventor teams via the use of examiner’s amendments. While both men and women applicants benefited, the probability of obtaining a patent was over 12 percentage points greater for women. Our results suggest that a portion of the gender gap in patenting could be eliminated through additional assistance during patent examination.