We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequences, we construct novel microdata. We find that invention and manufacturing...

We show that the acquisition of a startup inventor's first patent has a negative effect on the subsequent productivity of the patent's inventor, leading to 6.7 fewer patents being granted to the inventor over five years. This effect is not due to the inventor focusing on high-quality...

The paper addresses the issue of patenting inventions for new therapeutic uses in the light of the legal framework provided by the European Patent Convention and the case law of the EPO Technical Boards of Appeal. The patenting of new uses of a known compound is, especially in the pharmaceutical...

The European Union has established an almost complete system of protection of intellectual property, in part by harmonizing the laws of its Member States, in part by creating its own titles of unitary protection, in the fields of trade marks, designs and patents even by both harmonization and...

Novelty and Inventive Step are related but two different levels of enquiry under patent law. First level of enquiry, after the enquiry of patentable subject-matter, is that of novelty which is confined to one prior art reference. Second level of enquiry is that of inventive step which spreads...

Continuations allow inventors to add new claims to old patents, leading to concerns about inadvertent infringement and holdup. We study the use of continuations to obtain standard essential patents (SEPs), a setting where patents are easily linked to possibly infringing technology. Continuation...

The long Progressive Era, from 1900 to 1930, was the Golden Age of antitrust theory, if not of enforcement. During that period courts and Progressive scholars developed nearly all of the tools that we use to this day to assess anticompetitive practices under the federal antitrust laws. In a very...

The recent assertion of patents originally held by Theranos, the defunct blood analysis company whose founders are under federal indictment for fraud, highlights the existence of patents that might claim non-existent or inoperative inventions. While such patents may ultimately be subject to...

As defined, a patent is an exclusive right granted to an inventor in exchange for a full disclosure of the invention. Now that AI machines are able to invent arts and science, compliance with the current patenting requirements has become very challenging when it comes to AI inventions. Moreover,...

We explore the inventive activity and recombinant ideas in the field of economic growth research by analyzing the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification codes assigned to articles published in the Journal of Economic Growth. The average number of JEL codes, authors, keywords, pages...

Why do firms purchase technology instead of developing it internally? This paper studies two main motives behind technology-driven acquisitions: synergies and competition. We argue that the key determinant for the firm's choice of organic growth or acquisition of innovation is its profit shock...

Studying acquisitions in the US pharmaceutical industry, we first question how the alignment of acquirers’ innovation trajectories (as path-dependent or path-breaking change through the acquisition of targets with similar or distant innovations) with their own inventors’ pre-acquisition...

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the...

This article focuses on corporate spinouts as a strategy that can rejuvenate the inventive efforts of inventors with a long tenure in the same company. We rely on an unbalanced panel of 5,604 inventor-year observations to study a matched sample of 431 inventors employed by the Xerox Corporation...

The growth of the U.S. economy over the nineteenth century was characterized by a sharp acceleration in the rate of inventive activity and a dramatic rise in the relative importance of highly specialized inventors as generators of new technological knowledge. Relying on evidence compiled from...

Critics claim that patent screening is ineffective, granting low-quality patents that impose unnecessary social costs. We develop an integrated framework, involving patent office examination, fees, and endogenous validity challenges in the courts, to study patent screening both theoretically and...

University technology transfer offices (TTOs) are the gatekeepers to groundbreaking innovations sparked in research laboratories around the U.S. With a business model reliant on patenting and licensing out for commercialization, TTOs were positioned for upheaval when the America Invents Act...

A low-quality patent system threatens to slow the pace of technological progress. Concerns about low patent quality are supported by estimates from litigation studies suggesting that the majority of patents granted by the U.S. patent office should not have been issued. This paper proposes a new...

We employ the 1860 Census of Manufactures to study rural antebellum manufacturing in the South and Midwest, and find that manufacturing output per capita was similar across regions in counties specialized in the same agricultural products. The southern deficit in manufactures per capita appears...

We exploit the adoption of US state-level Paid Family Leave (PFL) laws to test whether family-friendly policies affect firm innovation. We find that PFL policies increase the innovation outputs of firms whose employees are more exposed to these laws. The stronger attraction and the higher...

Employing a sample of renowned U.S. inventors that combines biographical detail with information on the patents they received over their careers, we highlight the impact of early U.S. patent institutions in providing broad access to economic opportunity and in encouraging trade in new...

Small businesses in the United States are a major source of innovation and economic growth and employ more scientists and engineers than either large businesses or universities. In spite of these facts, recent reform in the patent system has had a disproportionately negative impact on small...

We examine the causal effects of terrorism on inventor productivity and mobility. During the five-year window after terrorist attacks, inventors close to the strikes are more likely to move to distant companies. While the inventors that continue working for firms near the attacks exhibit a...

We analyze the gender gap in the success of patent application at the USPTO. We leverage quasi-exogeneous variation from the random assignment of patent examiners within technology fields, allowing us to find the causal impact of examiner characteristics on the application success. We find...

During the Industrial Revolution and subsequently, it is widely believed that African Americans contributed disproportionately little to the economic development of the United States, especially in comparison to European Americans and immigrants from Europe. Yet, African Americans lived in...

This paper shows that inventors with an early patenting success have a higher inventive productivity during their remaining career. We use European patent data for a period of 32 years for 1240 German inventors. The patent data are linked with survey data that provide information on an extensive...

Previous literature has attributed differences in individuals' inventive productivity to a range of environmental, organizational and individual traits. However, the behavior of individuals with different inventive productivity has not been empirically explored in detail. Based on interviews...

At least since Arrow (1962), the effects of appropriability on invention have been well studied, but there has been little analysis of the effect of appropriability on the commercialization of existing inventions. Exploiting a database of 805 attempts by private firms to commercialize inventions...

This paper presents a model of the interaction between invention and learning by doing. Learning depends upon invention in that learning by doing is viewed as the serendipitous exploration of the finite productive potential of invented technologies. At the same time, the profitability of costly...

The growth in inventive activity during early American industrialization is explored by examining the careers of 160 inventors credited with important technological discoveries. Analysis of biographical information and complete patent histories through 1865 indicates that these 'great inventors'...

Inventors generally know more about their inventions than what is written down in patent applications. Because they possess this tacit knowledge, inventors may need to play an active role when patents are commercialized. We build on Arora (1995) and model firm-inventor cooperation in the...

Non-compete agreements help protect business investments by restricting worker mobility, thereby increasing firm incentives to invest. Yet, they could damage the efficacy of innovation investments that crucially rest on employee incentives. Exploiting staggered reforms of state non-compete...

This paper shows that inventors with an early patenting success have a higher inventive productivity during their remaining career. We use European patent data for a period of 32 years for 1240 German inventors. The patent data are linked with survey data that provide information on an extensive...

This paper develops a game-theoretic model that predicts when a university invention is commercialized in a start-up firm rather than an established firm. The model predicts that university inventions are more likely to occur in start-ups when the technology transfer officers (TTOs) search cost...

Metamorphic progress (productivity growth much faster than average) is often driven by Grilichesian inventions of methods of inventing. For hybrid seed corn, the enabling invention was double-cross hybridization yielding highly productive seed corn that was not self-propagating. Biotechnology...

For those who think of Cleveland as a decaying rustbelt city, it may seem difficult to believe that this northern Ohio port was once a hotbed of high-tech startups, much like Silicon Valley today. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cleveland played a leading role in the...

We examine the interplay of the three major university actors in technology transfer from universities to industry: the faculty, the technology transfer office (TTO), and the central administration. We model the faculty as an agent of the administration, and the TTO as an agent of both the...

This paper analyzes how both the value of ideas created as well as the security of intellectual property rights result from the choices of potentially creative people either to engage in creative activity or to be pirates, and from decisions of people who are engaged in creative activity to...

This paper studies the relationship between migration and the productivity of high-skilled workers, as captured by inventors listed in patent applications. Using machine learning techniques to identify inventors across patents uniquely, we are able to track the worldwide migration patterns of...