A current refrain in patent policy discourse is that “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” retard innovation. We briefly review expressions of the thesis to show that they reduce to the allegation that disagreements over enforceable patent scope and/or validity harm innovation....

Designing around patents is prevalent but not often appreciated as a means by which patents promote economic development through competition. We provide a novel detailed empirical study of the extent and timing of designing around patent claims. We study the filing rate of incandescent...

Governments often subsidize private R&D using both direct subsidies and tax incentives. In this paper, I develop a framework for studying their interdependence, which also provides a test for detecting capital market imperfections. I implement two quasi-experimental research designs to examine...

Digitalization is one of the main trends affecting firm-level innovation today. In this context, a better understanding of the multidimensional relationship between digital technologies, competences and firm-level innovation is necessary. For this purpose, this paper examines the role of digital...

This article explores the relations between firm growth and a set of four innovation indicators (in-house R&D, external sourcing, product innovation, and process innovation) that capture the different sources, modes, and outcomes of the innovative strategies adopted by firms. While existing...

We test whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by estimating IV structural equations for a large sample of Swiss firms. We find that better appropriability conditions at the industry level raise the number of competitors. However, conditional on the given industry...

We provide evidence that risk aversion leads pharmaceutical firms to underinvest in radical andnovel innovation. We do so by introducing a new measure of novelty: a drug candidate is novelif it is molecularly distinct from prior candidates. Using our measure, we show that firms face arisk-reward...

We examine the determinants of product, process, and organizational innovation, and their impact on firm labor productivity using data from a unique innovation survey of firms in Pakistan. We find significant heterogeneity in the impact of different innovations on labor productivity:...

We study the effect of different types of barriers to innovation (financial, demand, knowledge, market, cooperation, and regulatory barriers) on firm level innovation inputs and outputs. Using a pooled sample of three Chilean innovation surveys, based on an instrumental variables approach, we...

We test whether intellectual property rights (IPRs) foster or hinder innovation by estimating IV structural equations for a large sample of Swiss firms. We find that better appropriability conditions at the industry level raise the number of competitors. However, conditional on the given...