A ranking of the value of patents granted by legal protection

This paper aims at ranking the value of legal patent protection among countries, using the real options approach. In particular, we manage to overcome the problem of the lack of data for those countries that do not collect patent renewal data. The econometric technique we propose is well grounded in economic theory, specifically in the real options literature. Following this estimation strategy, we rank the value of legal patent protection for seventeen countries, closely reproducing other rankings based on surveys, for instance the PatVal survey by the EU Commission (2006), but relying on macro data publicly available and easy to access.