Does fragmented or heterogeneous IP ownership stifle investments in innovation?

Thickets of partially overlapping patent rights raise costs to secure IPR for innovation. Fragmented IP ownership raises coordination costs to resolve mutual blockades. Inadvertent patent infringement poses the risk of fruits from investments to be exploited. A gap in economic commitment levels may be exploited if capital-intensive innovators have more invested application-specifically than inadvertently infringed IPR owners. I study whether fragmentation or heterogeneous capital-intensities among owners of overlapping patents affect propensities to invest in innovation. I find that firms with small patent portfolios are less likely to invest in innovation if IPR is fragmented. Firms with large patent portfolios are less likely to invest in innovation if cited patent owners have smaller stocks of fixed capital. This suggests that effects of patent thickets on innovation are not evenly spread among innovating firms

Complementary assets, patent thickets and hold-up threats – do transaction costs undermine investments in innovation?

Innovation is commercialization of technology. Imperfections in markets for technology should leave marks on physical investments for innovation. Two types of transaction costs could affect innovative investments: royality stacking and hold-up threats. Backward references in firm's patent portfolio indicate potential technology suppliers. I find a negative effect of ownership fragmentation on investments related to innovation for firms with small patent portfolios. Hold-up threats are credible when upstream patentees have less specific capital sunk than innovating firms. Differences in fixed capital stocks between downstream firms and upstream patentees negatively affect investments in innovation for firms with large patent portfolios. These effects are specific to investments in innovation. There are no comparable effects on investments in R&D or residual physical investments. The effects of patent thickets on innovation are thus not uniform. They depend on the characteristics of the downstream firm

Essays on Financial Information in Text

In the first essay, I study how analysts' performance depends on their incentives and access to information using a regulatory shock and the textual content of analyst reports. My results focus on two aspects of performance, informativeness and bias. After incentives and access to information are reduced, analyst reports become less informative but also less biased. My identification strategy uses the Global Research Settlement as a shock that affected analysts at investment banks, but not other analysts, in a difference-in-difference design. I find that analyst reports become more similar to one another after the shock, an indication of less information content. Additionally, I find that text exhibits lower overall sentiment, which is driven by an increase in negativity, and that reports contain fewer markers of bias (less weaseling). The results highlight a trade-off with informativeness when regulating bias.In the second essay, we develop a new measure of innovation using a textual analysis of analyst reports. Our text-based measure gives a useful description of innovation by mature firms with and without patenting and R&D.; For non-patenting firms, the measure identifies firms that adopt novel technologies and innovative business practices (e.g., Walmart’s cross-geography logistics). For patenting firms, the text-based measure strongly correlates with valuable patents, which likely capture true innovation. The text-based measure robustly forecasts greater firm performance and growth opportunities for up to four years, and these value implications hold just as strongly for non-patenting firms

Guide to intangible asset valuation

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/2671/thumbnail.jp

Engines of Order

Over the last decades, and in particular since the widespread adoption of the Internet, encounters with algorithmic procedures for ‘information retrieval’ – the activity of getting some piece of information out of a col-lection or repository of some kind – have become everyday experiences for most people in large parts of the world

Questioning the role of the public sector in UK agricultural R&D

Agricultural research and development (R&D) has enjoyed public support for much of the twentieth century. For most of this time the agricultural research service (ARS) has experienced growing levels of public expenditure. However, in the latter part of this century radical changes have occurred to both its funding and research focus. Accordingly, there is a need to re-evaluate the role and purpose of publicly-funded agricultural R&D, This encompasses a number of issues which have to be explored. First, there have been numerous studies assessing the returns to public investment in agricultural R&D and, in general, these have found high rates of return which have pointed to under-funding of research. However, these studies have been questioned recently on a number of conceptual and empirical grounds. Taking account of these criticisms, but still using the traditional production function approach, this study has found that the returns to agricultural R&D remain high, but only for certain areas of the agricultural research service. This has questioned the conventional wisdom that public agricultural R&D is under-funded. Second, the role that the private sector has to play is in need of further investigation. Little is known about private sector activity in agricultural R&D and its motivations as regards funding it. As part of this research, a survey was conducted and this found that the private sector, in recent years, has reduced rather than increased research expenditures to compensate for the decline in public funding for applied and development work. Moreover, only a small proportion of private R&D expenditure is devoted to collaborative activity with the public sector, so that any recent shift towards promoting funding of agricultural R&D has been at the expense of research cohesion. Third, the fundamental theoretical basis for public support of agricultural R&D has been the concept of market failure. However, most of the arguments advanced only offer strong support for the public funding of basic research. Therefore, a number of other approaches have been employed to understand the reasons for continued public support of agricultural R&D. Significantly, the relatively recent body of theory connected with transaction cost economics provides some justification for continued public funding of applied research and development work. This, along with arguments advanced by policy analysts, has helped to establish that the ARS still has a role in providing public good research and in ensuring a cohesive framework for the funding of basic, applied research and development to meet effectively the demands of society. In summary, there is no question that the private sector cannot act as a complete and perfect substitute for publicly-funded agricultural R&D and without a publicly-funded UK agricultural research service would be at a severe disadvantage. Instead, emphasis should be placed on trying to integrate private and public research in this area, as so far the evidence suggests that this has not been very successful