Mobility and Career Concerns of Patent Examiners: an Analysis of U.S. Data

This paper is a contribution to the growing empirical patent literature that studies patent examiners' behavior. An important issue for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is that examiners tend to leave the office. Our analysis is a first attempt at understanding whether the behavior of patent examiners during their tenure at the office might be driven by career concerns. We use U.S. patent data and follow each of 652 patent examiners who granted patents on December 19, 1995. We have data at both examiner and patent levels: for each examiner we identify all the patents that have been granted during her/his tenure, and we collect data on the characteristics of each patent.