How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question …", who exploit the patent system to extract rents and thereby hurt innovation. We employ unprecedented access to NPE … also find that downstream innovation drops in fields where patents have been acquired by NPEs. Finally, our numerical …

. Accordingly, this paper offers an empirical comparison of patents in relation to the award of prizes for technological innovation … unpredictable, and was unrelated to such proxies for the productivity of the innovation as inventive capital or the commercial …