We propose a novel empirical strategy for detecting the potential effects of patent reforms on R&D investments. Our strategy builds on the insight that there is great variation in the extent to which firms rely on patents as an appropriation mechanism. Increases in patent protection should...

The combination of existing technologies is necessary for innovation. An important aspect of technology exchange between firms is that it generates both business creation and, possibly, business stealing. These countervailing effects generate potentially misaligned interests between technology...

Estimates of the private and social rates of return to investments in R&D are of high interest to economists, managers and policymakers. An important problem in the literature is that the canonical model used to obtain such estimates only allows R&D to diffuse through spillovers. This is a...

Entrepreneurial innovation involves turning embryonic inventions into marketable innovations through costly technology development. Do venture capitalists (VCs) target their funding and managerial efforts to technology development or do they support later stages of the innovation cycle involving...

The profitability, user costs and fixed costs of R&D jointly interact to determine firms' decisions on whether or not to invest in R&D and how much to invest. Which one of these three key determinants is more important at explaining differences in R&D across countries? We estimate the unobserved...

Portuguese and Spanish universities have adopted well-defined royalty sharing schedules during the last fifteen years. We investigate whether these inventor royalty shares have been effective at stimulating inventors' efforts and ultimately improving university outcomes. We base our empirical...