This paper aims at contributing to the literature on the determinants of patent value. First, it puts forward a new potential class of value determinants in the form of filing strategies (encompassing filing routes and drafting styles). Second, it provides empirical evidence suggesting that...

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on manufacturing firms in the US for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop an...

Political risk is widely present in developing but also in developed countries, and stems from a variety of sources. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we develop a theoretical model to investigate the impact of political risk on irreversible investment. Second, we apply our model to...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

Analysing 474 cases of firms going public in the German capital between 1892 and 1913, we show that innovative firms could rely on the Berlin stock market as a source of financing. The data also reveal that initial public offerings (IPO) of innovative firms were characterized by particularly low...