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...

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...