Patent citations often proxy for the value of innovation, and the very need for a proxy demonstrates the difficulty of getting direct measures. We value patents using novel data from non-practicing entities (NPEs) licensing revenues, the largest sample with direct measures analyzed to date. We...

How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new theoretical and empirical evidence to fill that gap. In the...

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 litigation-prone patents from small firms and...

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more. Using novel revenue data for tens of thousands of patents held by non-practicing entities (NPEs), we find that the relationship between citations and value forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in...

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations...

How to structure IP laws in order to maximize social welfare by striking the right balance between incentives to innovate and access to innovation is an empirical question. It is a challenging one to answer, both because innovation is difficult to value and changes in IP protection are rare. The...