issued a preliminary and non-binding guidance opinion (‘the Opinion’) in the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘the CJEU’) Case C-34/10 Professor Dr Oliver Brüstle v Greenpeace eV, which has provoked numerous responses from both sides of the embryonic stem cell patenting debate. Oral proceedings took place at the CJEU in Luxembourg on 11 January 2011, before the entire Grand Chamber of 13...

Regional Economic Growth and Human Capital: The Role of Overeducation The paper analyses the link between human capital and regional economic growth in the European Union. Using various indicators of human capital calculated from census microdata, we conclude that the recent economic performance of European regions is associated with an increase in overeducation. In fact, measures of educationa...

In 2014, at latest in 2015, extensive changes in the legal environment for patents in Europe are to be expected, having considerable impact on monopolizing inventions e.g. from the nanotechnology environment: With establishing the "European patent with unitary effect”, for the very first time the grant of single patents with uniform coverage of (almost) the entire territory of the European Unio...

Negotiations among nations on policies to promote international economic integration have widened in recent years to cover new issues; for example, foreign direct investment rules, policies to promote competition, the international movement of labor, the environment and monetary union. In these negotiations, a consensus among the parties negotiating is usually lacking and many of these negotiat...

EU 98/44 Article 4 1. The following shall not be patentable: (a) plant and animal varieties; (b) essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals. 2. Inventions which concern plants or animals shall be patentable if the technical feasibility of the invention is not confined to a particular plant or animal variety. 3. Paragraph 1(b) shall be without prejudice to the paten...

We examine the number of patent applications for climate change mitigation technologies (CCMT) filed at the European Patent Office and seek to relate it to the oversupply of emission allowances under the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS). We use a panel count data approach to show that firms covered by the policy take the oversupply into account when determining their level of inn...

The Effect of Migration and Spatial Connectivity on Regional Skill Endowments across Europe: 1988-2010 This paper investigates the effects of labour migration and openness to trade on regional skill endowments across the European Union at a time of increased economic integration. Using regional data from Eurostat’s Regio database and the open web source Openflight for the period 1998-2010 we te...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the private value of patents and R&D. We analyze an unbalanced sample of firms from five EU countries France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK in the period 1985-2005. We explore the relationship between firm’s stock market value and patents, accounting for the ‘quality’ of EPO patents. We find that Tobin’s q is positively and significantly...

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics poses a serious health threat. Since research into new antibiotics is not progressing at the same rate as the development of bacterial resistance, widespread calls for alternatives to antibiotics have been made. Phage therapy is an ideal alternative candidate to be investigated. However the success of phage therapy may be hampered by a lack of investment supp...