סמינר באסטרטגיה

Mark Schankerman, Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Abstracts: 

The first paper

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. 

Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? 

We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. 

We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to control for endogeneity of patent invalidation. 

Patent invalidation leads to a 50% increase in citations to the focal patent, on average, but the impact is heterogeneous and depends on characteristics of the bargaining environment. 

Patent rights block downstream innovation in computers, electronics, and medical instruments, but not in drugs, chemicals, or mechanical technologies. 

Moreover, the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers more follow-on innovation by small firms

The second paper

This paper studies the causal impact of patents on subsequent innovation by the patent holder. 

The analysis is based on court invalidation of patents by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and exploits the random allocation of judges to control for the endogeneity of the judicial decision. 

Patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent decrease in patenting by the patent holder, on average, but the impact depends critically on characteristics of the patentee and the competitive environment. 

The effect is entirely driven by small innovative firms in technology fields where they face many large incumbents. 

Invalidation of patents held by large firms does not change the intensity of their innovation but shifts the technological direction of their subsequent patenting.