Mandatory corporate patent disclosures and innovation

I investigate the effect of corporate patent disclosures on innovation. Using the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA) as a plausibly exogenous shock to corporate patent disclosures, I find evidence of the AIPA shaping innovation through two simultaneous channels. First, the AIPA encourages a firm to innovate by facilitating access to the scientific information contained in other firms' patent disclosures. Second, the AIPA discourages a firm from innovating by increasing the risk of leaking business-related strategies through its own patent disclosures. These findings are consistent with the view that corporate patents contain information useful for both science and business, and highlight their respective roles in generating both spillover benefits and proprietary costs of mandating patent disclosures. Finally, using textual analysis, I find that firms with high proprietary costs respond to the AIPA by strategically changing their patent disclosures to obfuscate exploitable business-related signals.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Jinhwan.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rodrigo S. Verdi and Eric C. So.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123580

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123580