The standardisation of trade secret protection was one of the goals of the TRIPs Agreement of 1998. Nevertheless, substantial differences in this protection remain across jurisdictions. When defining the optimal scope of trade secrets law, lawmakers should be aware that strong trade secret...

This paper examines whether and to what extent the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) affects technology spillovers between focal firms (i.e., receivers of spillovers) and peers (i.e., senders of spillovers). I find that technology spillovers from peers located in states adopting the UTSA are 27%...

This study investigates how the inevitable disclosure doctrine, a form of trade secret legal protection, affects venture capital (VC) investment. Using a data set of VC deals realized in the United States from 1980 to 2012, we find that a rule in favor of inevitable disclosure increases the...

As we enter the second year post enactment of the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, this Paper presents a snapshot of developments to assess whether there appear to be any significant doctrinal changes afoot in trade secret litigation, both civil and criminal, during the past year. I take a...

We use exogenous variation in the strength of trade secrets protection to show that a relative weakening of patents (compared to trade secrets) has a disproportionately negative effect on the disclosure of processes - inventions that are not otherwise visible to society. We develop a structural...

When we think of trade secrets, we often think of famous examples such as the Coca-Cola formula, Google's algorithm, or McDonald's special sauce used on the Big Mac. However, companies have increasingly made the novel argument that diversity data and strategies are protected trade secrets. This...

We use exogenous variation in the strength of trade secrets protection to show that a relative weakening of patents (compared to trade secrets) has a disproportionately negative effect on the disclosure of processes - inventions that are not otherwise visible to society. We develop a structural...

This paper examines the relationship between an increase in legislative trade secrets protection and its effect on tax avoidance by large companies. We do this by examining the state-staggered implementation of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, a state-level trade secrets law. First, we show that...

This paper examines how labor mobility restrictions such as non-compete clauses in employment contracts affect the incentives and resulting behavior of employees. Using the investment industry as a testing laboratory, we find that mutual fund managers respond to heightened career concerns due to...

Does heightened employer-friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state-level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would "inevitably disclose" trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting...

I examine the effects of proprietary information on corporate transparency and voluntary disclosure. To do so, I develop and validate two measures of firms' reliance on trade secrecy: one based on 10-K disclosures and one based on subsequent litigation outcomes. I complement these measures by...

The law cannot be a secret hidden from the public. This proposition strikes most of us as uncontroversial—a basic premise of any legal order committed to democratic accountability and the rule of law. Yet in this country secret law not only exists, but has become an entrenched feature of...

Firms strategically choose more conservative capital structures when they face greater competitive threats stemming from the potential loss of their trade secrets to rivals. Following the recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine by U.S. state courts, which exogenously increases the...

How do international organizations help states cooperate? Scholars have long argued that these organizations solve information problems by increasing transparency; however, we introduce a distinct information problem -- the disclosure dilemma -- that they can address using secrecy instead....

This study exploits the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as an exogenous shock that generates variations in the proprietary costs of disclosure. We find that firms respond to IDD adoption by reducing the level of disclosure regarding their...

In November 2013, the European Commission published a proposal for a directive on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information (trade secrets). A second version of this proposal, already amended by the Council in May 2014, gained the approval of the Committee on Legal Affairs...

The four-fold increase in shale gas production in less than a decade has brought with it a host of policy conflicts, including competing demands for transparency and secrecy with respect to the proprietary chemical formulas used in the hydraulic fracturing process. State legislatures and...

Non-compete agreements have become increasingly common in recent years, imposed on twenty to forty percent (or more) of employees in some industries, both in the knowledge-intensive fields where they might be expected but also in the service industries on low-wage workers. As non-competes have...

This study exploits the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as an exogenous shock that generates variations in the proprietary costs of disclosure. We find that firms respond to IDD adoption by reducing the level of disclosure regarding their...

This paper, using Japanese firm-level data, presents findings about innovative activities in the service sector and the role of patents and trade secrets on innovation. According to the analysis, first, service firms have fewer product innovations than do manufacturing firms, but the...

How should firms use patents and secrecy as appropriability mechanisms? Consider technologies that differ in the likelihood of being invented around or reverse engineered. Here, I develop the profit-maximizing strategy: (i) on the internal margin, the marginal patent balances appropriability...

Professor Walter Bayer und Thomas Hoffmann (Universität Jena) haben untersucht, welche Unternehmen von der Pflicht zur CSR-Berichterstattung nach dem Gesetzesentwurf zur Umsetzung der europäischen CSR-Richtlinie erfasst wären: lediglich 536. Große nicht börsennotierte Unternehmen, die schon...

Professor Walter Bayer und Thomas Hoffmann (Universität Jena) haben untersucht, welche Unternehmen von der Pflicht zur CSR-Berichterstattung nach dem Gesetzesentwurf zur Umsetzung der europäischen CSR-Richtlinie erfasst wären: lediglich 536. Große nicht börsennotierte Unternehmen, die schon...

This paper tests a number of hypotheses on the use and effectiveness of patents and trade secrets designed to protect innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate the complementary role of the two protection...

This paper tests a number of hypotheses on the use and effectiveness of patents and trade secrets designed to protect innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate the complementary role of the two protection...

The paper investigates the optimal scope of trade secrets law. In the model, one innovative firm invests resources first to produce knowledge, and then to protect it from unwanted disclosure. A rival firm invests to ferret out this knowledge. Trade secrets law affects this "secrecy contest" by...

Analysis of the challenges faced by the laws of patents and of trade secrets in the age of Internet and big data, particularly in terms of increased accessibility of massive amounts of data (big data), and of FRAND licensing conditions from a global perspective

The paper investigates the optimal scope of trade secrets law. In the model, one innovative firm invests resources first to produce knowledge, and then to protect it from unwanted disclosure. A rival firm invests to ferret out this knowledge. Trade secrets law affects this "secrecy contest" by...

"In the increasingly knowledge- and innovation-based economy in which the mobility of the workforce is vital, employees and ex-employees are considered to be one of the biggest threats to the existence of trade secrets. The interests of the former parties to the employment relationship are...

We present a model where an incumbent firm has a proprietary product whose technology consists of at least two components, one of which is patented while the other is kept secret. At the patent expiration date, an entrant firm will enter the market on the same footing as the incumbent if it is...