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...

We study the effects of an institution that pools patents across geographical markets on the licensing and adoption of life-saving drugs in low- and middle-income countries. Using data on licensing and sales for HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis drugs, we show that there is an immediate and...

We study the causal impact of patent invalidation on subsequent innovation and exit by the patent holder. The analysis is based on patent litigation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and exploits the random allocation of judges to control for endogeneity of the judicial...

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random...

This paper explores the dynamics of the transfer of U.S. patents and the significance of the initial missallocation of patent property rights. Here we find that the initial missallocation of patent property rights is large and differs substantially across patentees and technology fields. We also...

The "market for innovation" -- the sale and licensing of patents -- is an often discussed source of incentives to invest in R&D. This article presents and estimates a model of the transfer and renewal of patents that, under some assumptions, allows us to quantify the gains resulting from the...

Entrepreneurial firms are important sources of patented inventions. Yet little is known about what happens to patents "released" to the market when startups fail. This study provides a first look at the frequency and speed with which patents originating from failed startups are redeployed to new...

The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent...

This article presents the results of an analysis of the patent trading flows of small and large firms and the determinants of these firm's patent sale and acquisition decisions. We also examine whether these transactions lead to an excessive concentration of patent rights. We show that small...

This paper studies the effect of business partners on the commercialization of nvention based ventures, and it assesses the relative importance of partners' human and social capital on commercialization outcomes. Projects run by partnerships were five times more likely to reach...