More than 20 years after the establishment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), research has yet to explain accurately the new court’s impact on patent litigation, patenting, and inventive activity. To address this shortcoming in the literature, we analyze a novel data set...

We analyze price competition between a spatially differentiated product patentee and an imitator anticipating probabilistic future patent damages. We compare the performance of three damage regimes. The 'reasonable royalty' regime, which yields symmetric equilibrium pricing, maximizes static...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby...

James Watt’s 1769 patent is widely supposed to have stood in the way of the development of high-pressure steam technology until it finally expired in 1800. We dispute this popular claim. We show that although it is true that high-pressure steam technology developed only after the expiration of...

In 1982, the U.S. Congress established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) as the sole appellate court for patent cases. This court was created ostensibly to eliminate inconsistencies in the application and interpretation of patent law across federal courts and thereby mitigate...

Treating control as an asset that can be bought and sold, we introduce a model of the simultaneous and separable trading of ownership and control in a private information setting. The model provides a novel explanation for the prevalence and persistence of the separation of ownership from...

In 1982, the US Congress established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) as the sole appellate court for patent cases. Ostensibly, this court was created to eliminate inconsistencies in the application and interpretation of patent law across federal courts, and thereby mitigate...