This dissertation explores two factors that affect innovation. The first factor studied is extrinsic, namely, the legal environment. The second factor is a factor of input into innovation - culture of the inventors. The first chapter studies the impact of a weakened patent environment on research investments. Departing from the bulk of the literature, this chapter focuses on frivolous patenting among productive firms as opposed to frivolous patenting by patent trolls. A simple theory is proposed to model strategic behavior among productive firms in an environment that allows for frivolous patenting. When the law is changed to disallow this arms race, the model makes predictions on how the firms respond as a function of their exposure to the law. Specifically and somewhat surprisingly, the model predicts that the most exposed firms continue patenting similar to patent trolls since these firms extract rents due to the liberal patenting environment. Conditional on being exposed, the least exposed firms behave as one would expect non-patent trolls to behave and respond by dramatically reducing their patenting activity. Further, the model predicts scaled R&D investments respond in the shape of an inverted U-curve with respect to level of exposure to the law change. Both these predictions are verified in the data. These results lend credence to the hypothesis that productive firms file frivolous patents similar to patent trolls and that patent law can, on occasion, be too liberal in terms of allowing patentable subject matter. The second chapter focuses on one of the inputs into the innovation process - the inventors themselves. Using recently available machine learning techniques, ethnicities are inferred from the names of inventors on patents. Using the ethnicity of the inventors as proxy for culture, this work examines whether culture affects innovation. The first finding is that culture does play a role in influencing quality of innovation measures through citations, stock market value and a text based metric of impact and novelty. This finding shows that ethnicity is significant when predicting quality outcomes for patents. Secondly, when considering the list of inventors on a patent as a team, this chapter shows that ethnically diverse teams have higher quality patents. Furthermore, the gain in quality is not just from an increase from a homogeneous team to an non-homogeneous team but also from moving to a less diverse team to a more diverse team.

Creator

• Srinivasan, Sridhar

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-kfm5-2n54

Subject

• Intellectual property
• Finance

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14622
• etdadmin_upload_662046

Keyword

• Research and Development
• Patent
• Innovation
• Culture

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright