How do non-practicing entities (“Patent Trolls”) impact innovation and technological progress? We employ unprecedented … access to NPE-derived patent and financial data and a novel model to answer this question. We find that NPEs tend to acquire …

past innovations. With full patent protection, followers can catch up to the leader in their industry either by making the … simple form of licensing. Second, we show that full patent protection is not optimal from the viewpoint of maximizing the …

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 …

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 …

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