We study how the assignment of property rights between employees and their employers influences disclosures that reveal the productivity and ability of individual employees. To do so, we examine the effect of a court ruling that significantly shifted the assignment of intellectual property...

The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation....

We review the accounting literature on innovation, focusing on the attributes of innovation that collectively make it unique from other resources: novelty, nonrivalry, and partial excludability. These unique attributes help innovation drive economic growth but create information-based challenges...

We study the effect of senior manager oversight on inventors' productivity. We use changes in travel times between inventors and their employer's headquarters caused by flight time changes as sources of plausibly exogenous variation in manager oversight of inventors. We find that oversight...

In the global knowledge economy, intellectual property (IP) rights – and the innovations they are meant to spur – are important determinants of progress. But what does this mean for the nations of Africa? One view is that strong IP protection can facilitate innovation in African settings....

This article seeks enhanced understanding of the dynamics of open innovation and knowledge appropriation in African settings. More specifically, the authors focus on innovation and appropriation dynamics in African micro and small enterprises (MSEs), which are key engines of productivity on the...