Veranstaltungen

The Perks of Being Unknown: Implied Costs of Knowledge Seeking on Organizational Platforms

Presenter: Maren Mickeler (ISTO)

Discussant: Carolin Formella (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)

Everyone Likes to Be Liked: Experimental Evidence from Matching Markets

Presenter: Timm Opitz (Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb)

Discussant: Gresa Latifi (TUM)

This paper analyzes the contribution of entrepreneurial activities to gender earnings gaps among university faculty. Administrative data from universities (UMETRICS) linked to the universe of confidential W2 and 1099 tax records allow me to precisely classify earnings sources and measure faculty commercial engagement. I find substantial faculty gender gaps. Female faculty are 20 percentage points less likely to engage in entrepreneurial activities, with the entire participation gap driven by the gap in self-employment. The raw total male-female faculty earnings gap is $63k (on a base of $162k), with the gap in non-university earnings accounting for $18k (29%). Thus, though university earnings account for most of the total gap, commercial engagement opportunities substantially expand the gap. Earnings gaps also exist for all components of non-university earnings, including earnings from self-employment as well as from incumbent, young/startup, high-tech, and low-tech firms. Quantile regressions show that, as faculty move up the earnings distribution, gender earnings gaps grow and entrepreneurial activity becomes a more important contributor to the total gap, which is suggestive of a “glass ceiling” effect for female faculty. I also find that earnings gaps are small at career outset and then grow over time, but that the contribution of entrepreneurial activities to the total gap is relatively constant over the lifecycle.

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock is the dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of interventional policies to address the gender patenting gap. Using a randomized control trial (RCT) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), we identify the heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies of increased patent examination assistance on the probability of obtaining patent rights. Women applicants were about 11 percentage points more likely than men to benefit from this assistance, and the benefits were largest for U.S. inventors, new U.S. inventors, and in technology areas where women had the worst relative outcomes. Our results suggest that a portion of the gender patenting gap could be eliminated through the provision of additional resources and assistance during patent prosecution.

Autoren des Papiers: Nicholas Pairolero, Andrew Toole, Peter-Anthony Pappas, Charles deGrazia, Mike Teodorescu

Ansprechpartnerin: Svenja Friess

Since the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Mayo vs. Prometheus, the United States has arrived at a regime where scientific discoveries are patentable only to the extent that a claim represents an ‘inventive application’ of the underlying principle. Under this regime, not only have medical diagnostics become nearly unpatentable, but the doctrine of patent eligibility has begun to supplant the requirements of disclosure and non-obviousness as well. This work shows that the Mayo regime relies on a particular set of premises, both stated and unstated: an ontological premise about ‘laws of nature’; a historical premise about the treatment of discoveries in 19th-century Anglo-American patent law; a jurisprudential premise about legislative intent in the U.S. patent statutes; a doctrinal premise about the relationship of patent-eligibility to other patentability doctrines; and an economic premise about the basic research and the effect of patents on fundamental principles on innovation. I examine these premises, particularly the historical and economic ones, and show that most, if not all, are unfounded.  These findings have significant implications for current legislative efforts in the United States to reform the doctrine of patent eligibility.

Ansprechpartnerin: Marina Chugunova

Active markets for intellectual property (IP) are desirable because they facilitate the reallocation of new inventions to those who can best commercialize them. Therefore, active IP markets provide an incentive for inventors and specialized startups to invent in the first place, which promotes economic growth. However, IP markets are thought to be relatively inefficient. They are mostly decentralized and opaque markets, with substantial search frictions. Although non-practicing entities (NPEs) play an intermediary role to reduce such frictions, their operations are costly and their net effect on innovation and the IP market’s efficiency is unclear. Against this background, I structurally estimate a search-and-bargaining model of the brokered patent market. The model suggests that, compared to the Walrasian benchmark, the brokered patent market is relatively inefficient and NPEs’ net effect on patent market efficiency is negative.

Ansprechpartner: David Heller

Does grant peer review punish risk taking?  While risk is an inherent aspect of innovation, those projects with high degrees of risk may be more likely to lead to breakthrough innovation yet may face challenges in winning the support necessary to be carried out.  To study this, we analyze 103,164 R01-equivalent grants from the National Institutes of Health, 1980-2015.  To measure risk taking, we use four distinct approaches — extreme tail outcomes, disruptiveness, pivoting from an investigator’s prior work, and pursuing intellectually distant ideas from other investigators — that each capture a different aspect of what it means to take risks.  After carefully controlling for investigator, grant, and institution characteristics, we measure the association between risk taking and grant renewal.  Across each of these measures, we find grants with high levels of risk taking are renewed at lower rates than those with lower levels of risk taking. The magnitudes of these effects are large: when comparing grants in the top and bottom deciles of risk taking, grants with greater risk taking have a 20.5%, 24.4%, 16.9%, and 12.4% decline in renewal rate for each measure of risk taking, respectively.  We conclude with a discussion of the implications for policy-makers and managers of innovation for fostering risky research.

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Allocating innovation resources to their most productive uses is a challenge for innovators because they have incomplete information about which projects will be most productive. I empirically study how a group of large scientific labs traded off the exploitation of existing opportunities versus the exploration of new ones, that is whether they pursued safe projects to maximize short-term productivity or undertook high-variance projects to acquire information and improve long-term productivity. To recover how these labs made the exploitation-exploration tradeoff, I estimate a dynamic model of decision-making, assuming the labs approximated the value of exploration with a simple index. The type of index is well-studied in theory and well-used in practice but has not been applied to estimation of empirical decision models. The index model captures the labs’ decision-making well. Estimates of its free parameters suggest that the labs explored extensively. Counterfactual simulations show that, had the labs not explored, their output quantity would have decreased by 51%, and their citations would have decreased by 57%.

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Das Florentiner Seminar zu standardessentiellen Patenten (SEPs) zielt darauf ab, eine eingehende Diskussion von etwa 14-16 ausgewählten akademischen Beiträgen anzuregen, die sich mit der Lizenzierung und den Rechtsstreitigkeiten im Zusammenhang mit standardessentiellen Patenten befassen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf den gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Forschungsergebnisse.

Call for Papers

Bitte reichen Sie erweiterte Kurzfassungen oder vollständige Beiträge bis zum 31. Mai 2022 ein.

Die Annahmebestätigungen werden bis Mitte Juni 2022 verschickt.

Die endgültigen Fassungen der ausgewählten Beiträge sind bis zum 18. September 2022 einzureichen.

Weitere Informationen: Webseite der EUI

Different kinds of literature have suggested inconsistent answers to motivations behind a firm’s publications strategy, which, unlike patents, does not afford property rights but rather increases the chances of expropriation. A key unanswered question in the literature is: do firms use publications as an instrument to recruit scientists?  Drawing on the innovation literature, I argue that when a labor market shortage affords scientists higher bargaining power, firms tend to disclose more internal R&D via publications. To test this hypothesis, I use a novel dataset of 200 million job posts and 1.7 million firm-level publications. For identification strategy, I exploit the unanticipated rise of deep learning in AI, which resulted in a shortage of AI talents, and thus, increased scientists’ bargaining power. I demonstrate how human capital bargaining power increases firm-level R&D disclosure. This relationship is particularly salient when firms need highly trained scientists (e.g., PhD holders). Further, I document that AI job posts increase the number of AI publications, but only in the same fields of increased demands. Finally, using a novel methodology, I document that labor shortage did not increase the number of patent-paper pairs or simultaneous disclosure of the same research projects in both patents and papers.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose

Gemeinsam mit der TUM, TUM Main Campus, Seminarraum 0505.2544 (Eingang Luisenstraße/Theresienstraße, 2. OG)

Knowledge spillovers drive a wedge between private and social returns to R&D. Efficient innovation policy assigns subsidies to fields where spillovers are relatively important. We develop new measures for the private and spillover value of patented innovations and embed these in a structural microeconomic model to estimate field-specific marginal returns to R&D support. We find that expected returns to subsidy vary strongly by field and country, suggesting that targeted innovation policy has large potential to increase welfare. Because spillovers cross country borders unevenly, supranational coordination of innovation policy offers large potential efficiency gains, especially for smaller countries.

Kontakt: Fabian Gaessler