TY  - JOUR
AU  - Moser, Petra
AU  - Rhode, Paul W
TI  - Did Plant Patents Create the American Rose?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16983
PY  - 2011
Y2  - April 2011
DO  - 10.3386/w16983
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16983
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16983.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Petra Moser
Department of Economics
NYU Stern
44 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012
E-Mail: pmoser@stern.nyu.edu

Paul Rhode
Economics Department
University of Michigan
205 Lorch Hall
611 Tappan St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Tel: 734/647-5603
Fax: 734/764-2769
E-Mail: pwrhode@umich.edu
M1  - published as Petra Moser, Paul W. Rhode. "Did Plant Patents Create the American Rose?," in Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, editors, "The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited" University of Chicago Press (2012)

M3  - presented at "Rate & Direction of Inventive Activity Conference", September 30 - October 2, 2010
AB  - The Plant Patent Act of 1930 was the first step towards creating property rights for biological innovation: it introduced patent rights for asexually-propagated plants.  This paper uses data on plant patents and registrations of new varieties to examine whether the Act encouraged innovation.  Nearly half of all plant patents between 1931 and 1970 were for roses.  Large commercial nurseries, which began to build mass hybridization programs in the 1940s, accounted for most of these patents, suggesting that the new intellectual property rights may have helped to encourage the development of a commercial rose breeding industry.  Data on registrations of newly-created roses, however, yield no evidence of an increase in innovation:  less than 20 percent of new roses were patented, European breeders continued to create most new roses, and there was no increase in the number of new varieties per year after 1931.
ER  -