This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their ability to attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertainty and therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of...

We analyse firms’ incentives to cluster in an industrial district to benefit from reciprocal technology spillovers. A simple model of cumulative innovation is presented where technology spillovers arise endogenously through labour mobility. It is shown that firms’ incentives to cluster are...

Why do some start-up firms raise funds from banks and others from venture capitalists? To answer this question, I study a model in which the venture capitalist can evaluate the entrepreneur’s project more accurately than the bank but can also threaten to steal it from the entrepreneur. The...

We analyse the determinants of opposition to biotechnology and pharmaceutical patents granted by the European Patent Office between 1978–96. Opposition can be considered an early form of patent validity challenge suit. In our sample, 8.6% of the patents are attacked in opposition proceedings....

If redistribution is distortionary, and if the income of skilled workers is due to knowledge-intensive activities and depends positively on intellectual property, a social planner which cares about income distribution may in principle want to use a reduction in Intellectual Property Rights...

Using a repeated game approach, this paper models a North-South trade agreement under which North offers South improved market access (via a tariff reduction) if South agrees to prevent local imitation by strengthening its protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs). We show that such an...

This Paper is concerned with the interaction between trade policies and the protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). In particular, it investigates, within the framework of a general equilibrium model with endogenous growth, the welfare implications of an international agreement on one...

We address the problem faced by innovators who have an idea for a marketable product but must hire employees to bring the product to the market. Information leakage implies that newly-hired employees become informed of the idea and may attempt to bring the product to the market themselves. We...

This paper employs data from an extensive European survey to produce one of the first systematic assessments of the private economic value of patents. The estimated mean of our patent value distribution is higher than 3 million Euros, the median is about one-tenth, and the mode is around a few...

We develop a North-South model of reciprocal antidumping (AD). We find that AD wars are winnable for the Northern firm if the Southern market is sufficiently small relative to the North’s. The South can avert AD war with the North by expanding the home market size. It may however trigger AD...