We analyze the determinants of opposition to biotechnology and pharmaceutical patents granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) between 1978 and 1996. Opposition at the EPO is the most important mechanism by which the validity of a European patent can be challenged. In our sample, 8.6 percent of the patents are attacked in opposition proceedings. We show empirically that the likelihood of opposition increases with patent value, and that opposition is particularly frequent in areas with strong patenting activity and with high technical or market uncertainty. We comment on the implications of these results for the design of the patent and litigation system. JEL Classification: Keywords:

MiniJudge is free online open-source software to help theoretical syntacticians collect and analyze native-speaker acceptability judgments in a way that combines the speed and ease of traditional introspective methods with the power and statistical validity afforded by rigorous experimental protocols. This paper shows why MiniJudge is useful, what it feels like to use it, and how it works.

* Ph.D. Student, Associate Professor and Full Professor of Finance, respectively, at the

In this paper we investigate if past performance can be used to predict future performance in the European bond fund market. Both unconditional and conditional measures of performance are considered. To our knowledge, this is the first study which directly analyses the impact of conditioning information in assessing the persistence phenomenon for bond funds.. We find empirical evidence that indicates consistency of European bond performance. This evidence is particularly strong for the case of Spanish bond funds. Some evidence of persistence is also found for French and German bond funds. Additionally, it seems that the persistence is due mainly to the poor performing funds. The results were similar whatever methodology, cross-sectional regression analysis or contingency tables, we use. They indicate that the evidence of performance persistence decreases when we consider conditional alphas, particularly for the multi-index model, which suggests that some of the persistence phenomenon is driven by time-varying betas