Economic theory views patents as policy instruments aimed at fostering innovation and diffusion. Three major implications are drawn regarding current policy debates. First, patents may not be the most effective means of protection for inventors to recover R&D investments when imitation is costly...

The pressure to extract rents from academic research results has led many universities to file more patents and to rely on a growing range of monetization strategies including selling patents to Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs). We build a database of university patents granted by the USPTO and,...