Patents as Collateral Assets in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis

In this paper, the practice of using patents as collateral for debt has been studied. To this aim, the USPTO Patent Assignment database has been used and all the patents that reported the “security interest agreement” type of conveyance, registered in the 2007-2010 years, have been extracted. The final dataset is made up of a total of 8,818 security interest agreement records, in which 133,110 patents are pledged as collateral for debt. Nearly 70% of the patents are associated with a subsequent release of security interest, over the 2007 and 2015 period. The determinants that affect the likelihood and the timing of a patent being released have been investigated. In particular, we focus on the effects of the global financial crisis and the interplay between the financial intermediary types involved in the collateralization event. Survival models have been applied and the hazard rates on the likelihood of observing a release of a security interest have been estimated. The obtained results suggest that a security interest on a patent is more likely to be released in the case of granted and younger pledged patents, when firms that pledge patents as collateral are larger, and lenders are more experienced in handling intellectual property (IP) backed transactions. Moreover, all else being equal, a release is more likely to occur for patents with higher technical merit, as captured by forward citations. On average, after the beginning of the global financial crisis, a decrease in the probability of release of a security interest is observed. This effect is smoothed for larger firms and for deals involving banks, as opposed to specialty finance intermediaries. This evidence has been discussed in light of the literature on secured lending and the financing of innovative companies