What Drives Patent Policy?
Why, F. M Scherer asks, was there “an extensive tilt toward strengthened patent laws…during the 1980s and 1990s, even as economic research was revealing that patents played a relatively unimportant incentive role in most large companies’ research and development investment decisions”?
In a groundbreaking paper, “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States,” Mike Scherer tells the story of the interplay between political interests, policy and economics research over the last two decades, including the Bayh-Dole Act, the Hatch-Waxman Act, the creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the role of US in TRIPs negotiations.
In a review of this paper, Robert M. Hunt and Cecil Quillen write, “Professor Scherer presents a historical perspective that rarely appears in this literature. The paper is worth reading simply for its references because they remind us how much empirical research on the effects of patent policy has been forgotten by contemporary scholars…”
We are pleased to bring our readers both this important paper and the review.
