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on Intellectual Property Rights |
| By: | Armstrong, Christopher; Glaeser, Stephen; Park, Stella; Timmermans, Oscar |
| Abstract: | We study how the assignment of intellectual property rights between inventors and their employers affects innovation. Incomplete contracting theories predict that stronger employer property rights reduce the threat that employee inventors hold up their employers, thereby affecting inventor and invention outcomes. We test these predictions using a U.S. appellate court ruling that shifted the assignment of property rights from inventors to their employers. Within-employer-year analyses demonstrate that affected inventors are less likely to retain patent rights, assign patents to new employers, or leave their current employer, all consistent with reduced inventor ability to hold up their employers. Due to the reduced possibility of hold-up, affected inventors’ innovations are revealed more promptly when disclosed, draw from a broader set of prior patents, and spread more to subsequent patents. If affected inventors do leave their employer, they are more likely to relocate to unaffected states. Furthermore, employers affected by the ruling are more likely to locate their inventors in agglomeration economies and alter their innovation strategy by reallocating activity across states and expanding their innovation portfolios. Our collective evidence suggests that shifting intellectual property rights to employers affects inventor and invention outcomes by reducing the threat of employee hold-up from the employer's perspective. |
| Keywords: | corporate-innovation; disclosure; employee mobility; hold-up; incomplete contracts; employer-specific investment; corporate innovation |
| JEL: | J41 J61 O30 |
| Date: | 2026–01–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:130648 |
| By: | Mehic, Adrian (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)) |
| Abstract: | How are preferences for innovation formed, and what determines the long-run direction of technological change? This paper shows that early-life exposure to environmental accidents can durably reorient inventive effort decades later, even in the absence of targeted policy. I study radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident across Sweden, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in local exposure driven by rainfall. Combining municipality-level fallout data with Swedish patent records from 1967 to 2021, I find that more exposed areas experienced a persistent increase in green patenting, with no change in total patenting. The effect emerges only in the early 2000s, and is driven by individuals exposed during childhood: matching inventor-level data with detailed administrative records, I show that individuals exposed to fallout during their formative years are more likely to enter the patent system as green inventors and to begin their inventive careers with green technologies, consistent with a cohort-based entry mechanism. A simple model of directed technical change with formative exposure rationalizes these findings. In addition, the paper shows that green patents originating from more exposed areas do not have a lower number of citations than other patents, suggesting that the results are not driven by low-quality innovations. |
| Keywords: | Patent; Environmental accidents |
| JEL: | D91 O31 Q53 Q55 |
| Date: | 2026–02–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1552 |
| By: | Weinrich, Arndt |
| Abstract: | Exploiting granular European innovation data and the introduction of nexus requirements to patent boxes, I find that tightening access to preferential tax treatment of innovation output reduces inventive activity. A stylized framework and firm-reported constraints both point to internal funding as the binding mechanism. Consistently, effects appear on both the extensive margin, lowering the number of innovating firms, and the intensive margin, reducing resources devoted to innovation. Externally organized innovation declines relative to in-house activity, and innovation quality declines modestly. Spillover analyses indicate innovation decreases reflect forgone rather than reallocated innovation. Findings inform tax policy design and corporate innovation strategies. |
| Keywords: | nnovation, International Taxation, Patent Box, Nexus Requirements |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:arqudp:336789 |