How should businesses adjust strategic patenting to changes in patent law? Theoretically, under particular conditions, if the legal protection of patents is stronger, incumbent businesses would reduce patenting. When the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit assumed jurisdiction over patent...

How should firms use patents and secrecy as appropriability mechanisms? Consider technologies that differ in the likelihood of being invented around or reverse engineered. Here, I develop the profit-maximizing strategy: (i) on the internal margin, the marginal patent balances appropriability...

Through an inventor survey, we find substantial error in tracking mobility of engineers and scientists by patents. These errors cause misclassification of mobility -- false positives (wrongly recording change of employer), and false negatives (failing to record change of employer). Errors are...

The objective of patent rights is to foster innovation and economic growth. However, to date, there is little robust evidence that patents ldquo;workrdquo; as intended. Here, we study the impact of changes in effective patent rights within panels of up to 54 manufacturing industries in up to 72...

To encourage invention, society awards inventors exclusive rights through patents. Patent law trades off incentives to invent new technologies against reduced access to already invented technology. However, patent law being national, it is difficult to investigate the trade off without confound...

Theoretically, whether technology firms should increase external R&D in response to stronger patent law depends on the effects of law on returns to external and internal R&D. Exploiting geographical differences in the strengthening of patent protection due to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...

Through an inventor survey, we find substantial error in patent-based career histories of engineers and scientists due to contract R&D, mergers and acquisitions, and organization policy and name change. By contrast, online career profiles provide more accurate histories. Patent histories cause...