This paper investigates the role of patent protection in the global investment decisions of multinational firms. Using … comprehensive firm-level panel data of German multinationals, we investigate how changes in a host country’s patent protection … influence the extensive and intensive margin of foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions. We isolate the effect of patent …

Licensing in a patent thicket allows firms to either avoid or resolve hold-up. Firms' R&D incentives depend on whether … they license ex ante or ex post. We develop a model of a patent portfolio race, which allows for endogenous R&D efforts, to … likely to avoid patent portfolio races, since the threat of hold-up increases. On the other hand, more valuable technologies …