patents Archives

Risk in Discovery-Stage Biotech Innovation

The main goal of this project is to enhance our understanding of what drives firm decisions in discovery-stage drug development, when risk of failure and variance in outcomes are highest. Specifically, this project contributes to existing literature on biopharmaceutical innovation, by testing whether the theory that larger firms pursue novel drugs is valid in the earliest phase of the drug development pipeline. Using data on early-stage VC funding and FOIA’ed biopharmaceutical alliances across thirty years, I use data-driven methods to examine the relationship between the novelty of biotech innovation and investor decisions at the earliest stage of drug development and contextualize its magnitude against other innovation characteristics. In doing so, I resolve a potential discrepancy between academic findings and industry observations.…Read More

Patents: Ability or Choice?

This paper’s main contributions are to use a novel data set, introduce a new natural experiment, and exploit a quasi-random shock to show that patenting choices affect three important dimensions of innovation outcomes: the patent quantity, the patent quality, and the firm-level inputs (R&D, investment, and employees).…Read More

Social Media and Startup Innovation: A Human Capital Perspective

In this study we plan to fill this research gap by examining whether social media can help startups to access broader knowledge and subsequently facilitate innovation. Our goal is twofold in this research. First, we explore the effect of social media adoption on startup’s knowledge diversity. Second, we analyze whether startups can successfully transfer the diversified knowledge into innovations.…Read More

Towards a Causal Theory and Test of Network Effects: Structural Holes, Alliance-Network Externalities, and Organizational Innovation

We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.…Read More

Mergers and Innovation: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

The goal for this paper is to detangle whether mergers and acquisitions occurring in the biopharmaceutical industry yield their intended effects. More specifically, how does increasing M&A activity affect different measures of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry…Read More

Rich on Paper? Chinese Firms’ Academic Publications, Patents, and Market Value

By combining various databases of academic publications and patents of China’s publicly listed firms, we explore the effects of academic publications on firm valuation.…Read More

Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?

Commuting is costly for employees, but is it costly for employers in terms of lost productivity? We study the causal effects of commuting distance on inventor productivity. Specifically, we estimate how inventor productivity changes when their employer relocates.…Read More

Benchmarking U.S. University Patent Value and Commercialization Efforts: A New Approach

University research-originated patented inventions are both becoming more numerous over time, and of higher “quality” as measured by standard social science metrics. Despite the significance of patented university research, it is difficult to observe the extent to which universities are able to capture the economic value from their patented inventions. …Read More

The Trends of Drug Pricing After Entries of Generic Drugs

In pharmaceutical markets, there are evidences that after branded drugs lose patent exclusivity, the entries of first generic drug do not significantly bring the drug prices down.…Read More

Analyzing Full Text Patent Documents for Business Insights

This proposal for research funding aims to develop a general tool using cutting edge machine learning methods to value patents.…Read More

Categories, Search, and the Influence of Patented Innovation

In this paper, we argue that an innovation’s influence is shaped by the social structures that it is embedded within; specifically, the categories that are used to organize items in a given domain. …Read More

Financing Local Innovation

What is the impact of financing on innovation, and how do entrepreneurs strategically access credit? Innovative ventures need advance financing, but they face unique obstacles to credit access. …Read More

FDA Regulation and Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Standard economic theory recognizes a trade-off inherent in intellectual property protection between increased incentives for firms to innovate due to potential monopoly rights and the deadweight loss from those rights.…Read More

Generic Competition and Strategic Delegation: An Empirical Study in Drug Patent Licensing

We plan to study the role of strategic delegation in the patent licensing process. In particular, we will examine the contractual terms of a large database of pharmaceutical drug license arrangements (royalty rates, contingencies, royalty bases, etc…), as well as which contractual terms were redacted versus non-redacted.…Read More

Firm Responsiveness to Location Subsidies: Regression Discontinuity Estimates from a Tax Credit Formula

In 2011, California Governor Jerry Brown recognized several of the state’s existing firm incentive policies aimed at catalyzing innovative activity in the state, to be ineffectual, citing poor incentive design.…Read More

Patent Value and Citations: Creative Destruction or Strategic Disruption?

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in the middle.…Read More

Investment as an Influencing Strategy

Institutional environments are often considered exogenous in firms’ investment decisions. While the non-market strategy literature has discussed various approaches that firms may adopt to influence their interactions with institutions, such discussion is mostly absent in the analysis of market strategies. …Read More

Trade Secrets and Innovation: Evidence from the “Inevitable Disclosure” Doctrine

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 trade secrecy regime on individual‐level patenting outcomes. …Read More

The Effects of Proprietary Information on Corporate Disclosure and Transparency: Evidence from Trade Secrets

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. …Read More

The Impact of Funding Sources on the Rate and Direction of Academic Biomedical Innovation

Given the large and growing role of academic entrepreneurs and inventors via patents, start-up development, and university-industry relationships, understanding how funding sources may impact academic scientists’ incentives is a crucial area for innovation research, particularly in the biomedical sciences. …Read More