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 …-derived patent and financial data, as well as a novel model that guides our data analysis. We find that NPEs acquire patents from …

: (i) firm-level balance sheet data; (ii) social security data on the universe of workers; (iii) patent data from the … European Patent Office; (iv) the national registry of local politicians; and (v) detailed data on local elections in Italy. We …

innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to …

to gauge how efficiency in the patent market affects growth …

regularities regarding innovation and growth differences across the firm size distribution. We also incorporate patent citations … into our theoretical framework. The framework generates a simple test using patent citations that indicates that entrants …

-1994. The interaction of this pre-existing network structure with patent growth in upstream technology fields has strong …