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...

Pharmaceutical firms typically enjoy market exclusivity for new drugs from concurrent protection of the underlying invention (through patents) and the clinical trials data submitted for market approval (through data exclusivity). Patent invalidation during drug development renders data...

We analyze firms’ incentives to cluster in an industrial district to benefit from reciprocal technology spillovers. A simple model of cumulative innovation is presented where technology spillovers arise endogenously through labor mobility. It is shown that firms’ incentives to cluster are...

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative...

This paper assesses the productivity puzzle critically and gives an outlook on the COVID-19 crisis. It offers two main conclusions. First, it posits that a large fraction of the productivity puzzle can be solved by incorporating intangible capital into the asset boundary of the national...

The increasing commercialization of university discoveries has initiated acontroversy on the impacts for future scientific research. It has been argued that anincreasing orientation towards commercialization may have a negative impact onmore fundamental research efforts in science. Several...

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of mergeractivities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions(M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financialinformation and patent data for public limited...

Using a new dataset encompassing more than 2,200 inventions made by Max Planck Societyresearchers from 1980 to 2004, we explore how licensee and technology characteristics affectthe licensing and commercialization of technologies from public research. We find noevidence that spin-offs and...

This paper analyses whether strategic motives for patenting influence the characteristics ofcompanies’ patent portfolios. We use the number of citations and oppositions to representthese characteristics. The investigation is based on survey and patent data from German companies.We find clear...

By using the PatVal-EU dataset we find that the most important determinant of patent licensing is firm size. Patent breadth, value, protection, and other factors suggested by the literature also have an impact, but not as important. In addition, most of these factors affect the willingness to...