Intellectual property protection mechanisms (IPPMs) are critical to fostering innovation and their relevance has grown enormously with the increased trade in goods and services involving intellectual property. Scholars have investigated what factors facilitate or hinder the use of such IP...

We establish the importance of team-specific capital in the typical inventor's career. Using administrative tax and patent data for the population of US patent inventors from 1996 to 2012, we find that an inventor's premature death causes a large and long-lasting decline in their co-inventor's...