Pharmaceutical Product Liability, Litigation Regimes and the Propensity to Patent: an Empirical Firm-level Investigation

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.