We analyze the strategic protection decision of an innovator between a patent and secrecy in a setting with horizontally differentiated products. By introducing the patenting decision into the well known circular city model, the impact of the disclosure requirement linked to a patent application...

There is substantial empirical evidence that innovation is geographically concentrated. Unlike what is generally assumed, however, it is not clear that localised knowledge spillovers provide a theoretically valid explanation for this. Studying spillovers of cost-reducing technology between...

We propose a new method to characterize firms' inventive activities via topological data analysis (TDA) that represents high-dimensional data in a shape graph. Applying this method to 333 major firms' patents in 1976—2005 reveals substantial heterogeneity: some firms remain undifferentiated;...