The 'home advantage' effect and patent families. A comparison of OECD triadic patents, the USPTO and the EPO

This paper examines the extent of the 'home advantage' effect in the USPTO and the EPO patent data and in the OECD triadic patent families. By comparing a set of internationalisation indicators for a sample of European, US and Japanese MNEs it finds that, contrary to what is often assumed, this effect is not only present in the USPTO but also in the EPO. OECD triadic patent data, instead, are not biased towards any particular home country. It also finds that, because MNEs do not systematically file their patents with the EPO, the USPTO and the JPO, the OECD triadic patent family dataset excludes many patents, especially those invented in the US and accounted for in the USPTO, though it is mainly only low-value patents that are excluded. Thus OECD triadic patents can be considered a satisfactory alternative to the USPTO and the EPO for measuring R&D internationalisation.