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"Courts Technological innovations."
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PATENTS AND CUMULATIVE INNOVATION
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.
Journal Article
The Choice between Formal and Informal Intellectual Property: A Review
We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal intellectual property protection.
Journal Article
Patent thickets, courts, and the market for innovation
We study how fragmentation of patent rights and the formation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement when patent rights are fragmented and when there is less uncertainty about court outcomes, as was associated with the \"pro-patent shift\" of the CAFC. We confirm these predictions empirically using a data set that covers patent suits in U.S. district courts during the period 1975–2000. Finally, we analyze how fragmentation affects total settlement delay, considering both the reduction in dispute duration and the increase in the number of patent negotiations.
Journal Article
Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms
We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) in the intellectual property space. We find that, on average, NPEs appear to behave as opportunistic “patent trolls.” NPEs sue cash-rich firms and target cash in business segments unrelated to alleged infringement at essentially the same frequency as they target cash in segments related to alleged infringement. By contrast, cash is neither a key driver of intellectual property lawsuits by practicing entities (e.g., IBM and Intel) nor of any other type of litigation against firms. We find further suggestive evidence of NPE opportunism: targeting of firms that have reduced ability to defend themselves, repeated assertions of lower-quality patents, increased assertion activity nearing patent expiration, and forum shopping. We find, moreover, that NPE litigation has a real negative impact on innovation at targeted firms: firms substantially reduce their innovative activity after settling with NPEs (or losing to them in court). Meanwhile, we neither find any markers of significant NPE pass-through to end innovators, nor of a positive impact of NPEs on innovation in the industries in which they are most prevalent.
This paper was accepted by Tyler Shumway, finance.
Journal Article
Innovation and competition: An unstable relationship
This paper analyzes how the establishment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982 has affected the relationship between innovation and competition. Using the same dataset as Aghion et al. (Competition and innovation: an inverted-u relationship. Quarterly Journal of Economics 2005; 120(2):701-728) I find a structural break in the early 1980s. Taking this break into consideration, the inverted-U empirical relationship between innovation and competition found by Aghion et al. does not hold. In fact, I find that there is a positive innovation-competition relationship during the period 1973-1982 and no relationship at all in the 1983-1994 period.
Journal Article
Evaluative Spillovers from Technological Change
Most studies of technologies’impact on occupational change focus on occupational groups’ adoption and use of particular technologies in a field or workplace. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic study of a crime laboratory, I focus instead on “evaluative spillovers”: the comparisons that occupations encounter when technologies change the work of neighboring occupations in their field. I explore what happened when DNA profiling was held up as the “gold standard” of forensic evidence, resulting in scientific, public, and legal scrutiny of other forensic science occupational groups. Comparisons with DNA profiling challenged the working techniques and the values of firearms examiners, toxicologists, and narcotics analysts, but each group responded differently, either embracing or resisting changes to their work practices. Their responses were predicated on the institutional pathways that evaluative spillovers traveled through the field in locales such as professional association meetings and court proceedings. These three aspects of the occupational system—technique, values, and institutional pathways—influenced how workers negotiated the impact of technological change in the field of forensic science.
Journal Article
Quantifying the Synergistic Effects of Sustainable Development Policies: A Quasi-natural Experiment Approach
Sustainable development is inherently systemic and interconnected, yet its policies have often been evaluated in isolation. This study first combines sustainable development goals to construct a comprehensive indicator for measuring high-quality development, incorporating economic sectors, total factor productivity, technological innovation, environmental quality, and living standards. The study then examines the synergistic effects of three distinct types of sustainable development policies—command-and-control, market-based, and socially participatory—using environmental courts, carbon emission trading, and non-governmental organization-led pollution information disclosure as quasi-natural experiment shocks. Utilizing panel data from 285 Chinese cities, the triple-difference model estimates reveal that the synergistic effects of sustainable development policies significantly enhance high-quality development levels by 4.74%, approximately twice the combined marginal effects of individual policies. Event study analysis, dual machine learning, placebo tests, and synthetic triple-difference model estimations confirm the robustness of causal evidence. Green innovation, government attention, and industrial structure drive the effectiveness of these synergistic effects. Top-down environmental inspections by the central government bolster the synergistic impact of sustainable development policies. Simultaneously, these policies help address the resource curse in old industrial base cities. More importantly, the effectiveness of these sustainable development policies is influenced by the personal characteristics of local party secretaries, such as gender, education level, field of study, promotion period, and homophily.
Journal Article
Does Digital Justice Contribute to Firm Innovation? Evidence from China’s Internet Courts
This paper examines the impact of Internet courts on firm innovation, emphasizing the role of digital judicial protection. Using a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach and data from Chinese listed companies, we find that the establishment of Internet courts significantly enhances firm innovation, a result robust across multiple tests. Mechanism analysis reveals that Internet courts promote innovation by increasing firms’ willingness to innovate and accelerating digital transformation. Heterogeneity analysis highlights stronger effects in Internet-related services, industrial digitization sectors, private firms, and firms facing high litigation risks, likely due to their greater reliance on digital justice systems. These findings provide novel evidence linking digital justice systems to firm innovation and offer actionable insights for fostering innovation through judicial reforms in the digital era.
JEL: K41, O32, P37.
Journal Article