in the PC industry and fosters innovation. …

Innovation in the U.S. economy is about employing and rewarding highly talented workers to produce new products. Using … innovation, or high variance payoffs, are more likely to attract and pay for star workers. Thus, firms in high variance product …

financial patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and to have also impacted other patent offices around the world. A … number of scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decisions themselves …. This paper reviews the history of business method and financial patents briefly and then explores what economists know …

We investigate the value creation or destruction associated with the introduction of software patents in the United …) firms around the time of important court decisions that impacted software patents, and the second analyzes the relationship … between firms' stock market value, the sector in which they operate, and their holdings of software patents. We conclude that …

. Although changes in the legal environment in the US in the 1990s made it much easier to obtain patents on software and …, ultimately, on business methods, less than half of the firms in this sample obtained, or attempted to obtain, patents. For those … that did, we hypothesize that patents conferred competitive advantages that translate into higher probability of survival …

Many experts speculate that U.S. antitrust policy towards horizontal mergers has been too lenient. We estimate the …