Working papers and book chapters

Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) economists and their collaborators conduct a variety of policy relevant research and make their preliminary findings available as working papers and book chapters.  

On your marks! Trademark races and their impact on product introductions

Carsten Fink, Christian Helmers, Julian Kolev and Andrew A. Toole
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-6
December 2024
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The supply of competitively-effective trademarks is limited, leading different firms to often attempt to register the same or very similar marks for the same types of products. If two or more firms do so while intending to introduce new products into commerce, the result is a “trademark race,” where priority is determined by the firm that files first. We analyze the impact of such races for trademark protection on product-market outcomes. We show that races are more likely to occur for competitively effective trademarks: those with fewer, shorter, or more-common words; further, firms that successfully obtain such trademarks are more likely to continue using them five years after registration, reflecting higher value. We then identify a sample of races where filing dates are sufficiently close so that applicants are unlikely to be aware of each other's interest in the contested mark, generating quasi-random variation in the assignment of priority. We show that relative to their earlier-filed, race winner counterparts, later-filed applications experience an average of 1.5 years of additional examination pendency, and are 50% less likely to obtain trademark registration. Tracking subsequent applications from the same firm, we also find that race losers exhibit a 20-40% lower hazard rate for introducing any new product in the same product class as the original application. Finally, using a simple counterfactual analysis, we show that a hypothetical market allowing race winners and losers to frictionlessly trade priority could result in a 10% increase in the rate of successfully-registered trademark applications.


Examining U.S. Patent Values: Renewal Choices, Citation Dynamics, and Economic Growth

Ryan Hughes
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-5
December 2024
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Untapped Potential: Investigating Gender Disparities in Patent Citations

Gauri Subramani and Michelle Saksena
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-3 
July 2024 
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The contribution of startups, venture finance, and patenting to innovation in U.S. agriculture

Gregory D. Graff, Charles deGrazia, and Nicholas Rada
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-2 
July 2024 
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Technical Documentation for Patent Litigation Docket Reports Data, 1963-2020

Andrew A. Toole, Richard Miller and Ted M. Sichelman
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2024-1 
March 2024 
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Competitive Dynamism in Nascent Markets: Trademarks and Superstar Firm Entry in the Metaverse

Wendy A. Bradley and Julian Kolev 
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2023-1 
September 2023 
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Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO

Nicholas A. Pairolero, Andrew A. Toole, Peter-Anthony Pappas, Charles deGrazia and Mike Teodorescu
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2022-1
November 2022
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Immunity to the COVID-19 shock? The case of US innovation, resilience and ingenuity: Global innovation responses to Covid-19

Walter G. Park, Andrew A. Toole, Gerard Torres and Richard D. Miller
Resilience and Ingenuity: Global Innovation Responses to Covid-19
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The Miner Act of 2006: Innovating for Safety and Health in U.S. Mining

Andrew A. Toole, James Forman, and Asrat Tesfayesus
Global Challenges for Innovation in Mining Industries
April 2022
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Using Intellectual Property Data to Measure Cross-Border Knowledge Flows

Jake Dubbert, Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew A. Toole
Trade in knowledge: Intellectual property, trade and development in a transformed global economy
February 2022
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Technical Documentation for Matching Patents and Trademarks to the 2017 National Establishment Time Series Database

Ryan Hughes, Charles deGrazia, and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-4
September 2021
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Software Piracy and IP Management Practices: Strategic Responses to Product-Market Imitation

Wendy A. Bradley and Julian Kolev
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-3
August 2021
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Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset (AIPD) on a blue background with an outline of a head.

Identifying artificial intelligence (AI) invention: A novel AI patent dataset

Alexander V. Giczy, Nicholas A. Pairolero, and Andrew Toole
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-2
June 2021
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PatentsView: An open data platform to advance science and technology policy

Andrew Toole, Christina Jones, and Sarvothaman Madhavan
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-1
June 2021
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Technical Documentation for the 2019 Patent Examination Research Dataset (Patex) Release

Richard Miller
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-4
August 2020
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U.S. Intellectual Property and Counterfeit Goods—Landscape Review of Existing/Emerging Research

Vega Bharadwaj, Marieke Brock, Bridey Heing, Ramon Miron, and Noor Mukarram
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-3
April 2020
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Piracy Landscape Study: Analysis of Existing and Emerging Research Relevant to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement of Commercial-Scale Piracy

Brett Danaher, Michael D. Smith, and Rahul Telang
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-2
April 2020
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The Promise of Machine Learning for Patent Landscaping

Andrew A. Toole, Nicholas Pairolero, James Forman, and Alexander V. Giczy
USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2020-1
March 2020
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Previous working papers