Patent application numbers grow exponentially in many industries, a phenomenon that has been linked to high fragmentation of patent ownership. Contradicting these findings and theoretical arguments, we show that such fragmentation is not a precondition for sudden and strong increases in...

Under well-settled patent law, the decision regarding whether to grant or deny a patent turns on technical fact-finding. Recommendations made in recent patent system reform reports issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) could have a substantial...

Commonly used industry classifications do not reliably predict stock co-movement because companies change their core structure quickly relative to the slow and haphazard updating of widely used subjective industry classifications. We construct an objective industry classification that clusters...

The aim of this paper consists of valuating a real biotechnology firm that is based on a portfolio of several drug development projects at different phases. They are patentprotected R&D projects and their values are obtained by implementing an extension of the real options approach in Schwartz...

We investigate how intangible capital in form of intellectual property, such as patents, might mitigate financing constraints. While scholars have already argued that patents might have a signalling value reducing information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders, we quantify the value of...

Using a novel database of firm patents and board characteristics across 45 countries, we examine both within- and cross-country determinants of board gender diversity and its relation to corporate innovation. Boards are more likely to include women in countries with narrower gender gaps, higher...

We document high economy-wide correlations between the Equity Risk Premium (ERP) and the aggregate volume (rho=-0.69) and value (rho=-0.75) of patenting activity by public firms in the United States over the 1977-2018 period, contradicting Schumpeter's (1939) opportunity-costs hypothesis of...

When innovation is cumulative, patent protection on early inventions can generate holdup problems if later complementary patents are owned by different firms. Consistent with the property rights literature, we show that shareholder ownership overlap across firms with patent complementarities...

Corporate innovation propels both company performance and economic growth. Yet, measuring corporate innovation proves to be challenging, leading researchers to rely on a variety of different signals, such as reported R&D expenditures, patent citations and new product announcements. I posit that...