We develop an analysis of ex ante monitoring of risky projects in banking. If protected from competition, banks are more concerned about not catching good risk projects when the perceived state of the economy improves, while they are more concerned about being induced to finance bad risk...

We investigate the causal effect of patent rights on cumulative innovation, using large-scale data that approximate the patent universe in its technological and economic variety. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for patent invalidation that exploits personnel scarcity in post-grant...

We use exogenous variation in the strength of trade secrets protection to show that a relative weakening of patents (compared to trade secrets) has a disproportionately negative effect on the disclosure of processes - inventions that are not otherwise visible to society. We develop a structural...

Im Rückgriff auf die Innovationsforschung wird ein Ansatz für eine gemeinsame Sprache und eine konsistente Systematik für Innovationen im Umweltbereich entwickelt. Dazu werden einige allgemeine Begriffsdefinitionen der Innovationsforschung erläutert, der Begriff Umweltinnovation eingeführt...

During the last years more and more discussions came up about the contribution of technology-oriented and technology-intensive industries for employment and economic development. One reason for some of the contradictory evaluations of technology-intensive industries can be attributed to...

The influence of environmental policy on innovative behaviour of companies has so far received little attention in scientific discourse. Based on recent literature, the paper analyses the impact of requirements, levies, permits, liability laws, and the EC-eco- audit regulation with respect to...

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that firm’s innovation behavior exhibits high persistency but not much is known about potential contingencies affecting the degree of persistence. This paper focuses on the role of the local knowledge environment and asks how local knowledge spillovers...