Silviase/jgov_v1.4_full_ann huggingface dataset:
significant and positive in every specification. In other words, compared with the average patent value of all corporate patents, there is some significantly positive impact of a corporate assignee without co-assignees of either governments or universities on patent values. The coefficients of patents filed jointly by no less than two corporations (corp_corp) are also positive and significant. Thus, compared to the average patent value of all corporate patents, there is also a positive impact of the first assignee of a corporation with a corporate co-assignee on patent values. These results indicate that patents filed by the private sector without co-assignees of either governments or universities are highly valued on average.

On the other hand, coefficients of government patents (gov) are negative but insignificant in all specifications, except column (3). The coefficients of university patents (univ) are also negative but statistically insignificant in all specifications. Thus, it is very unlikely that genuine public sector patents (without corporate co-assignees) have higher values on average.

Regarding public-private collaborative patents, coefficients of industry-government patents (corp1_gov) are positive and significant. Thus, compared to the average patent value of all corporate patents, there is a positive impact of the first assignee of a corporation with a government co-assignee on patent values. This implies that if a corporation is the first assignee of a patent, those patents filed with a government research institute are highly valued on average. One possible reason would be the presence of numerous government sponsored research consortia in Japan, as has been extensively examined in the literature $ ^{29} $ . Regarding other combinations of co-assignees, we have virtually no statistically significant results for all specifications.

With regard to the policy effect, the coefficients on government patents ( $ gov \times D99 $ ) are positive and strongly significant in all specifications. These results suggest that although the average value of government patents is not very impressive, this value has risen since the introduction of the pro-patent policy. On the other hand, there was no significant change in the value of university patents throughout the observation period.

We obtain virtually similar results if we use a year dummy of D98. The salient features in columns (5) and (6) represent the significantly positive coefficients of $ corp1\_gov \times D98 $ . If we evaluate the policy effect by using the benchmark year of 1998, we could detect the positive policy impact of the first assignee of a corporation with a government co-assignee on patent values. This fact lends itself to several interpretations but we suspect that industry-government cooperative research is influenced by the pro-patent policy in an expeditious way.

In summary, the value of government patents has increased since the introduction of
the pro-patent policy in the late 1990s. This may reflect the fact that the pro-patent policy in Japan is only now beginning to have some impact on the patenting behavior of government research institutes in the late 1990s. With regard to university patents, however, the pro-patent policy does not appear to dictate the patenting behavior of university researchers. The organizational and institutional features of Japanese universities may not accommodate themselves as yet to patenting biomedical research outcomes despite the introduction of several facilitating policy measures in the late 1990s. We will discuss some related issues in the final section.

Most other independent variables eventually end up having some explanatory power. Coefficients of $ pat\_scope $ are negative and statistically significant in all specifications; this means that technologically-focused patents have higher values. This result seems to be somewhat inconsistent with prior findings in the literature. For example, Lerner (1994) obtains positive and significant coefficients of patent scope on the market value of biotechnology firms. On the other hand, Lanjouw and Schankerman (1997) report no significant coefficients of patent scope on the probability of infringement litigation, which would be closely related to patent values. Harhoff et al. (2003) also find that patent scope has no significant effect on German patent values. However, it should be noted that these studies define patent scope by using the number of four-digit IPC codes referred to in the patent. Our definition is somewhat different from them, and the technology fields are also distinct from each other. One method of technology classifications seems to be critical in order to detect the impact of patent scope on patent values.

With regard to the remaining explanatory variables, as expected, $ jp_{only} $ is negative and strongly significant. The scale effect of the first assignee ( $ pat_{size} $ ) is statistically significant and negatively correlated with the patent value. There appears to be a negative scale effect when prolific patentees file less valuable patents on average. The coefficient of $ science\_ratio $ is positive and significant, as expected. Science-linkage appears to be positively associated with patent values, although there seems to be some multicollinearity between $ science\_ratio $ and $ jp_{only} $ . The coefficient of listed is negative but insignificant in various specifications. This suggests that listed large companies do not have a specific advantage in producing valuable biomedical patents.

### 8. Concluding Remarks

This paper examines the value of patents filed by various types of assignees both before and after the introduction of the pro-patent policy measures in the late 1990s. Our results provide little evidence to support the argument that the pro-patent policy encourages universities to translate their “important” research outcomes into patents. On the other hand, although
government patents do not have very impressive patent values on average, the values began to increase after the introduction of the pro-patent policy. These results indicate that the Japanese pro-patent policy distinctively affects the patenting behaviors of government and university researchers. What lies behind these asymmetric responses is still rather uncertain but we are of the opinion that institutional and organizational features of government research institutes and universities are the keys to elucidate the causes of different responses between these institutes.

Finally, we would like to make some speculative comments on the possible sources for the different attitudes of public sector researchers toward the Japanese pro-patent policy. We believe that government research institutes have been strongly encouraged to file patents by jurisdictional authorities since the introduction of the First Basic Plan for Science and Technology in 1996 because the number of patents (as well as patent licenses) is regarded as one of performance indexes in an annual third-party review. Then, the review is reflected in the prioritization of budget allocation, according to the Basic Plan $ ^{30} $ . In addition, compared to universities, the government research institutes, especially the top 5 research institutes, are tightly supervised by vertically divided bureaucracy and are likely to be controlled via administrative guidance in a more expeditious way.

On the other hand, patenting may not be a part of the ordinary academic lives of university researchers. In Japan, most major research universities are national universities. Although they are closely supervised by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, they consider the publication of academic papers to be much more important, as is the case with top research universities in the U.S. (Mowery et al., 2001; Agrawal and Henderson, 2002). The increased trend of university patenting can be partly explained by the recent facilitating policy measures that somewhat alleviate red-tape routine in government research funding, donations by the private sector, hiring temporary researchers, commissioned research, and negotiations pertaining to the ownership of research outcomes. However, they still require cumbersome procedures with quite a few administrative staffs under one-fiscal year budget constraint.

It is possible that the public sector plays an important role in biomedical research that is characterized by the high importance of basic research done at universities and public research institutions. However, there are many steps before basic research can lead to commercialization. In particular, at the stage of the commercialization of scientific knowledge, one of the important factors affecting collaborative R&D incentives is an ex ante agreement governing the ownership of innovative output (Aghion and Tirole, 1994). Since intellectual
property rights are likely to belong to the research partners as a whole, industry-university-government collaboration in research tends to be accommodating the government’s intention of widely disseminating research results. This, however, could possibly weaken the private sector’s incentive to collaborate for research.

Producing and transmitting scientific knowledge can assume a wide variety of forms, depending on research areas, organizations, participants, and other factors. Accordingly, there is no single answer with respect to how to obtain public support for biomedical research. Patenting is a means rather than an end. Consequently, pro-patent policy measures must be designed by giving due consideration to the characteristics of the institutional and organizational features of the public sector on a case-by-case basis.

The present study opens up a number of questions for further study. First, we focused our research purpose rather narrowly on the patenting activity of the public sector. However, patenting is not necessarily closely associated with research activity itself, and there would be some discrepancy between propensity to patent and research incentive. Therefore, our findings would be subject to a number of caveats. For example, could the increase in the co-applications of the patent be regarded as the result of effective research collaborations among “inventors”? This study did not utilize any information about inventors, which is in fact also available in patent documents. It would be beneficial to scrutinize the characteristics and configurations of inventors for each patent although this is time-consuming work. By way of a future study, we will investigate an inventors’ analysis.

Second, we must admit that the observation period of the present study—particularly the duration after the introduction of the pro-patent policy measures—may be too short to convincingly detect any policy effects on patenting. An on-going investigation is needed before any strong conclusions can be drawn about the role of the public sector in biomedical research, which typically requires a very long-term R&D process.

Third, since 2001, there have been several organizational reforms for the public sector in Japan. In April 2001, almost all public research institutes were reorganized into “independent administrative agencies” (IAAs) that appeared to be independent of the government, as literally interpreted. However, they have been financially as well as managerially supervised tightly by a vertically divided bureaucracy. With regard to Japanese national universities, these were reorganized into semi-private entities, so-called “national university foundations,” in April 2004. The National University Foundation is an intermediate legal entity that functions in between government agencies and public foundations. However, these organizational changes are beyond the scope of the present study that uses data on patents between the years 1991 and 2002.

Finally, is it desirable to encourage governments and universities to file patents in the first place, that reflect the salient features of Japanese innovation system, such as the low
mobility of researchers, weak patent protection, and backwardness in bio-medical research. Undoubtedly, these issues are important, but the lack of solid explorations on these issues is mainly due to data constraints in Japan.

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Figure 1 Number of biomedical patents (basic technologies)

Note: Here, technology classifications are based on the Japan Patent Office (2003). See Table 2 for a summary description of the biomedical fields. The number of patent counts in 2002 are omitted from this figure due to significant truncation bias. Refer to the text for further detail.
Figure 2 Number of biomedical patents (post-genome technologies)

Note: In this figure, technology classifications are based on the Japan Patent Office (2003). See Table 2 for a summary description of the biomedical fields. The number of patent counts in 2002 are omitted from the figure due to significant truncation bias. Refer to the text for further details.
Figure 3 Number of biomedical patents (other technologies)

Note: In this figure, the technology classifications are based on the Japan Patent Office (2003). See Table 2 for a summary description of the biomedical fields. The number of patent counts in 2002 are omitted from the figure due to significant truncation bias. Refer to the text for further details.
Figure 4 Number of patent filings by single assignee (corp)

Note: The classification of assignee types are based on the authors' definitions. corp denotes a corporation. The number of patent counts in 2002 is omitted from the figure due to significant truncation bias. See the text and Table 4 for further details.
Figure 5 Number of patent filings by a single assignee (gov, univ)

Note: The classification of assignee types are based on the authors' definitions. gov denotes a government research institute, and univ denotes a university. The number of patent counts in 2002 is omitted from the figure due to significant truncation bias. See the text and Table 4 for further details.