Pharmaceutical Product Liability, Litigation Regimes and the Propensity
to Patent: an Empirical Firm-level Investigation
Abstract
Our data on the legal status of patent applications is from European
Patent Office’s (EPO) PATSTAT database which contains bibliographic and
legal status firm-level patent data from leading industrialized and
developing countries for the period 1995-2015. Sixteen different forms
of legal statues are broadly classified and systematized into four broad
categories. The first category entails the patent applications sent to
EPO. This category is used to code firm-level observations based on
whether the patent application has been submitted to EPO. The second
category comprises the pooled firm-level observations for which the
patent application has been approved and official validated. This
category comprises the firms for which a valid patent has been approved
in a given year. The third category comprises the firms whose patent
application has been rejected by EPO on various ground which exceed the
scope of this paper. And fourth, the remaining forms of legal status
were coded into miscellaneous category which amounts to a minor fraction
of the whole set of applications and which are omitted from the
empirical analysis.