How much effect has patenting on innovation?

An interesting study by Brent Allred and Walter Park, “Patent rights and innovative activity: Evidence from national and firm-level data", published in the Journal of International Business Studies 38(6): 878-900, is one of those economist studies that shed some interesting light on the relationship between patents and innovation, a much underexplored area in Europe.

read Roger Smeets’ summary of the study. Roger is a PhD student at the Nijmegen Centre for Economics (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands).