The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the length of the grant lag under the early disclosure system in Japan. First, we measure the length of the grant lag. Second, we investigate whether reducing the grant lag significantly increases patent applications. We use data from 1985 to 2000 on 101 Japanese companies. The parameter for the grant lag was significantly negative in all equations. Therefore, reducing the grant lag increases patent applications. We also empirically investigated the determination of R\D. The grant lag significantly affects R\
