Publications

Business Method Patents and Financial Services
Clifford S. Stanford
The Atlanta Fed's 2003 Financial Markets Conference focused on the emergence and legitimization of "business method" patents in the United States and how this development affects financial services innovation and the future of financial services firms. This article provides an overview of the conference papers and discussions. Two of these papers are featured in this issue of the Economic Review.

The Uninvited Guest: Patents on Wall Street
Robert P. Merges
For at least the past twenty-five years, financial services industries have been creating innovative products and services without the help of patents. The 1998 State Street Bank case changed all this, making patents freely available in these industries. Will patents help or hurt financial services innovation in the long run? This article sheds some light on this issue.

The International Law of Business Method Patents
John M. Conley
This article reviews the current state of U.S. and international patent law with respect to business methods. After outlining the basic U.S. and international requirements for patentability, the author describes the evolution and current state of both American law and international law, particularly in the European Union, various European countries, and Japan.

Take Your Model Bowling: Forecasting with General Equilibrium Models
Marco Del Negro and Frank Schorfheide
This article describes the workings of the DSGE-VAR, a procedure that combines DSGE models and vector autoregressions (VARs). The procedure uses DSGE models as priors to restrict the VAR's parameters.