Recent empirical studies find vast industry differences in how patent protection influences innovation and growth. An optimization of aggregate growth, therefore, implies the need for a flexible patent regime responding to each industry's characteristics. In practice, sector-specific...

This paper provides a theory of strategic innovation project choice by incumbents and start-ups. We show that prohibiting killer acquisitions strictly reduces the variety of innovation projects. By contrast, we find that prohibiting other acquisitions only has a weakly negative innovation...