How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new theoretical and empirical evidence to fill that gap. In the...

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more. Using novel revenue data for tens of thousands of patents held by non-practicing entities (NPEs), we find that the relationship between citations and value forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in...