development. Evidence from the failed Industrial Revolution in 14th-century China illustrates the empirical relevance of the …

period 1550–1630. We add evidence from Japan and China from the early modern period until 1800 to obtain a human capital …

sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs … acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level incumbents would have chosen, and use patents to signal their companies …-run performance, but also infl ates their acquisition prices, and lowers their acquirers' overall profits. Patent law usefulness …

motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents. …

impact on patent count at industry level, and this impact is larger than that of R&D expenditures. We confirm that this … measure of innovation alternative to patent count. Unlike the impact on patent count, we do not find that VC investment … and material. Therefore, our finding suggests that, at industry level, VC investment increases the patent propensity but …

allocated to high-quality invention projects. Using data on patents granted to small firms and individuals, we find evidence …

show that investment can take place even without patent protection, as parasites limit their imitation to preserve the …, and sometimes greater without patents. Our framework is general enough to apply to other situations such as investment in …

We study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains … from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent … transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new source of gains from trade, comparative advantage in patent …