There are tons of studies around patents and the economics thereof, but you will not find such a convenient answer to your question. The reason is that it's ver

There are tons of studies around patents and the economics thereof, but you will not find such a convenient answer to your question. The reason is that it's very hard to measure the costs and benefits to quantify these incentives and dis-incentives. Furthermore the benefits and costs of patent systems are often orthogonal. If you want to get an idea of the depth of the field, look at all the studies cited by this paper, and look at all the various methods, metrics and datasets that have been considered so far: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260