This paper empirically examines patents for financial formulas and methods, whose patentability was recently confirmed in the litigation between State Street Bank and Trust and Signature Financial Group. The number of such filings and awards has been accelerating. Patent filings by academics...

An extensive theoretical literature has examined the impact of information problems on interactions between government bodies and private firms. One little-explored empirical testing ground is the patent system. This paper examines the administrative practices of patent offices in sixty...

Public programs to provide early-stage financing to firms, particularly high-technology companies, have become commonplace in the United States and abroad. The long-run effectiveness of these programs, however, has attracted little empirical scrutiny. This paper examines the impact of the...

In the dozen years since the Global Financial Crisis, there has been a surge of interest on the part of governments in promoting entrepreneurial activity, largely by providing financing. This essay explores these policies, focusing on financial incentives to entrepreneurs and the intermediaries...

This paper examines the litigation of patents relating to financial products and services. I show that these grants are being litigated at a rate 27 to 39 times greater than that of patents as a whole. The patents being litigated are disproportionately those issued to individuals and to smaller,...

This paper examines the sources of financial innovations between 1990 and 2002, using Wall Street Journal articles as indicators of innovations. No evidence suggests that larger firms are particularly innovative; in many specifications, there is a disproportionate representation of smaller firms...

The paper seeks to understand the impact of the patent system on innovation by examining shifts in the strength of patent protection across sixty countries and a 150-year period. An examination of 177 policy changes reveals that strengthening patent protection appears to have few positive...

This paper studies how investing in venture capital (VC) affects the entrepreneurial outcomes of individual limited partners (LPs). Using comprehensive administrative data on entrepreneurial activities and VC fundraising and investments in China, we first document that individual LPs, on...