Does Compulsory Licensing Discourage Invention? Evidence From German Patents After WWI

We wish to thank Tim Bresnahan, Dora Costa, Peter di Cola, Mark Duggan, Richard Epstein, Bob Hall, Walker Hanlon, Helen Kim, Wolfgang Keller, Steve Maurer, and seminar participants at the All-UC Group in Economic History, LSE, Northwestern Law, Queens, HBS, Hoover, Michigan, and UCLA for helpful comments and conversations. We are particularly grateful to Jochen Streb and Carsten Burhop for sharing copies of archival data, which allowed us to digitize the patent data. We also thank Petra Baten, Marianne Hock, Sarah Hueller, Katharina Koberski, Fred Panier, Minh Phan, Christopher Sung, and Mark Walsh for invaluable research assistance. Moser gratefully acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation through NSF Grant SES0921859, CAREER Grant 1151180, and CASBS. Bianchi thanks the Stanford Institute for Policy Research for financial support through the George P. Shultz Fellowship. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.