Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly altered the consumption patterns of cultural goods. Using novel data from a consumer survey conducted in January 2022 across 14 countries, we address two key issues. First, we provide a descriptive analysis of changes in the consumption of four cultural goods—music, films and series, games, and books—focusing on shifts between legal and illegal consumption. Second, we reassess the relationship between digital piracy and legal sales, with a particular emphasis on age differences. Our findings reveal that among those who engaged in illegal consumption during the pandemic, 6–8% were new pirates, primarily individuals who experienced income reductions and increased time at home due to the shift to remote work or schooling. Among adults, these disruptions were linked to a decline in legal sales of music and games. In contrast, the displacement of legal audiovisual consumption was observed only among adults who continued working in person. Minors displayed different patterns: for them, illegal consumption was negatively associated with legal book consumption but positively linked to legal audiovisual consumption.

We investigate how the introduction of post-grant reviews at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the America Invents Act (AIA) has influenced the behavior of patent applicants and examiners. This reform may incentivize applicants to narrow the scope of their patents, thereby reducing the risk of post-grant reviews and enhancing patent legal quality. To test this hypothesis, we employ a standard Difference-in-Differences (DID) analysis and find that applicants are more likely to narrow the scope of their patents. This change has resulted in fewer challenges to U.S. patents, yielding estimated annual savings of 62 to 148 million. When applicants do not preemptively narrow the scope during filing, we observe tougher scrutiny during the examination process, as examiners effectively compensate for the applicant’s lack of action. However, this “disciplinary effect” of narrowing patent scope is absent in complex fields characterized by patent thickets, where the reform does not lead to significant improvements in U.S. patent legal quality.

This paper investigates the contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to environmental innovation. Leveraging a novel dataset of USPTO patent applications from 1980 to 2019, it explores the domain of Green Intelligence (GI), defined as the application of AI algorithms to green technologies. Our analyses reveal an expanding landscape where AI is indeed used as a general-purpose technology to address the challenge of sustainability and acts as a catalyst for green innovation. We highlight transportation, energy, and control methods as key applications of GI innovation. We then examine the impact of inventions by using measures and econometric tests suitable to establish 1) how AI and green inventions differ from other technologies and 2) what specifically distinguishes GI technologies in terms of quality and value. Results show that AI and green technologies have a greater impact on follow-on inventions and display greater originality and generality. GI inventions stand out even further in these dimensions. However, when we examine the market response to these inventions, we find positive results only for AI, indicating a mismatch between the technological vis-à-vis market potential of green and GI technologies, arguably due to greater uncertainty in their risk-return profiles.

This paper examines the extent to which patent litigiousness relates to entry into a new technological domain (TD). Unless firms have sufficient intellectual property (IP) capabilities, patent litigiousness in the form of opposition may raise barriers to entry. We test this hypothesis using a large-scale dataset of patents applied for at the European Patent Office (EPO) between 2000 and 2015. We introduce a new measure of TD patent litigiousness based on the frequency of oppositions at the EPO. Patent litigiousness is negatively associated with technological entry for small firms, especially in high-tech and complex TDs. Unlike small firms, large firms benefit from previous experience with opposition, which favors the development of IP capabilities and reduces the uncertainty of entering highly litigious TDs.

The development of low emission vehicles (LEVs) represents a typical case of technological competition between two green trajectories. On the one hand, the incremental trajectory aims at improving the efficiency of the dominant design, greening the internal combustion engine (ICEG). On the other hand, the radical trajectory targets the progress of hybrid, electric and fuel cell vehicles (HEF). This paper studies the innovative behaviours of firms in the automotive sector patenting in both trajectories. It investigates the extent to which technological leadership in green patents is rooted in firms’ knowledge and capabilities accumulated in brown domains. Using a novel dataset of automotive firms with patenting activity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 2001 and 2018, we find that related ‘brown knowledge’ denotes leadership in green trajectories.