We show that universities in the United States that provide stronger royalty incentives to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university characteristics. We use pre-sample data on university patenting to control for the potential endogeneity of royalty shares....

In a model with moral hazard and asymmetric information, we show that it can be welfare improving to differentiate patent lives when firms have different R&D productivities. A uniform patent life provides too much R&D incentive to low-productivity firms and too little to high-productivity ones....

We examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation. Recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to R&D. Yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to...

I present evidence on the private value of patent rights in France for different technology fields and nationalities of ownership, using nonparametric techniques and a parametric model of patent renewal. I find that the distribution of the value of patent rights is highly skewed, that patent...

We investigate how liability rules and property rules protect intellectual property. Infringement might not be deterred under any of the enforcement regimes available. However, counter-intuitively, a credible threat of infringement can actually benefit the patentholder. We compare the two...

We study how fragmentation of patent rights and the formation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement...

This article examines the impact of patent scope on firm value. I develop a proxy for patent scope based on the International Patent Classification scheme. Using a sample of 535 financing rounds at 173 privately held venture-backed biotechnology firms. I show that the breadth of patent...

type="main" <p>Product quality certifiers may not reveal the identity of unsuccessful applicants/sellers for three reasons. First, they respond to the desire of individual sellers to avoid the stigma from rejection. Second, nontransparency helps a certifier to increase his market power by raising...</p>

We examine the structure of more than 100 alliances by Internet portals and other firms between 1995 to 1999 from a contract-theory perspective. Models of incomplete contracts frequently invoke unforeseen contingencies, the cost of writing contracts, and the cost of enforcing contracts in...