innovations by taking more time to perform their reviews. We study the relationship between the length of patent review and the … importance of inventions in a theoretical model. We build a simple model of the US patent review process. The model predicts that …, controlling for a patent's position in the new technology cycle, more important innovations would (and should) be approved more …

software industry. We focus on two key aspects: patent portfolio size which affects bargaining power in patent disputes, and … the fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') which increases the transaction costs of enforcement. We develop a …

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation …? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related … to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeal …

A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often … and can account for the differences across sectors in the propensity to patent. Surprisingly, in general, the protection …

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 …

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 …

This paper shows that the process of enforcing patent rights both dilutes and distorts Research and Development (R …&D) incentives. We examine the characteristics of litigated patents by combining, for the first time, information about patent case … filings from the US district courts with detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. By comparing filed cases to a …

We study how fragmentation of patent rights ('patent thickets') and the formation of the Court of Appeal for the … Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing …. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement agreements when patent rights are fragmented and …