I present evidence on the private value of patent rights in France for different technology fields and nationalities of ownership, using nonparametric techniques and a parametric model of patent renewal. I find that the distribution of the value of patent rights is highly skewed, that patent...

We investigate how liability rules and property rules protect intellectual property. Infringement might not be deterred under any of the enforcement regimes available. However, counter-intuitively, a credible threat of infringement can actually benefit the patentholder. We compare the two...

We examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to R&D. Yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to...

We show that universities in the United States that provide stronger royalty incentives to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university characteristics. We use pre-sample data on university patenting to control for the potential endogeneity of royalty shares....

In a model with moral hazard and asymmetric information, we show that it can be welfare improving to differentiate patent lives when firms have different R&D productivities. A uniform patent life provides too much R&D incentive to low-productivity firms and too little to high-productivity ones....