# S9 Ep31: How well does patent screening work?

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/voxtalks-economics-504930/s9-ep31-how-well-does-patent-screening-work.md
Podcast: [VoxTalks Economics](https://stenobird.com/podcast/voxtalks-economics-504930)
Published: 2026-05-29T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://audioboom.com/posts/8909280
Audio file: https://audioboom.com/posts/8909280.mp3?modified=1780038839&sid=4966228&source=rss
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/voxtalks-economics-504930/episodes/s9-ep31-how-well-does-patent-screening-work
Duration seconds: 1966

## Resource

Someone once held a patent on the swing. A piece of wood. Two ropes. The US Patent Office granted it. How often does that actually happen, and what does it cost when the system gets it wrong? Or, how often is a valid patent claim rejected? Until now, no one knew. Tim Phillips talks to Mark Schankerman of LSE and CEPR, who with co-authors William Matcham spent eight years building the tools to find out. Using natural language processing across a dataset of around one million patent applications, twenty million claims, and fifty-five million examiner decisions, they measure how similar each incoming claim is to the hundred million claims that preceded it, going back to 1976. They find that 81% of initial patent claims fall below the patentability threshold; examiners must negotiate that figure down round by round. And they do a pretty good job. But around a third of all abandoned applications contain at least one valid claim the system failed to protect. You don’t see patents that aren’t awarded, so those errors have, until now, been invisible. The research behind this episode: Matcham, William, and Mark Schankerman. Forthcoming. "Screening Property Rights for Innovation." Econometrica . Available as CEPR Discussion Paper DP18334 (gated). Current version dated January 2026. To cite this episode: Phillips, Tim, and Mark Schankerman. 2026. “How “well does patent screening work? VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE. About the guest Mark Schankerman is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where his research spans innovation, intellectual property, and the economics of technology. His work has examined how patent rights shape R&D incentives, the market for tec…

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