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Patent monetisation is an important source of revenues worldwide. This activity is increasingly carried out by patent assertion entities (PAE), which are at the origin of about 40% of infringement actions filed in the United States. This paper uses an original database of US patents reporting PAE patent acquisitions. We document two key empirical facts about the presence of PAEs in the market for patents. First, PAEs build large patent portfolios and contribute significantly to patent transfers in the US. Second, their impact on follow-on innovation is, on average, negative. With a series of dynamic diff-in-diffs analyses, we estimate a significant post-transfer drop in forward citations received by patents acquired by PAEs. This drop is not immediate but takes some years to materialise. Heterogeneity tests show that our results are driven by acquisitions of old and highly cited patents, as well as by patent acquisitions by large patent aggregators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual property regimes governing university inventions were quite diverse in Europe at the end of the 1990s. Several European countries maintained the so-called professor's privilege, an exception to employment law whereby university researchers were allowed to retain the ownership of academic inventions. The 2000s were characterised by convergence towards a more homogeneous system, in which university administrations took control of IP management. We investigate the impact of the reform and we observe a decline in the technological importance and the value of the patents owned and managed by universities in the countries abolishing the professor's privilege. On the contrary, by differentiating the academic patents by type of ownership, we find that the technological importance of academic patents owned by companies has instead increased. Our study produces some new results that may alert policymakers to the possible unintended consequences of the university ownership model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]