ESSAYS ON PATENTS AND INNOVATION DISCLOSURE STRATEGY

158 pagesInnovation is essential to firm performance and economic growth. During each stage of the innovation process within firms, there is much valuable information that firms could choose to disclose to the public. This dissertation aims to empirically evaluate what impacts innovation disclosure and construct novel, text-based measures of innovation disclosure using Natural Language Processing techniques. Chapter 1 empirically examines the net impact of patent enforcement by different types of entities on the volume of patent filings disclosed publicly in the affected technology classes. The study finds that patent litigation in the United States reduces disclosed invention activities within the same technology class and that litigation by Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leads to a significantly larger reduction than litigation by product companies. The negative impact of PAEs is primarily driven by large patent aggregators, especially after the America Invents Act of 2012. Chapter 2 builds on the previous chapter and empirically examines how patent litigation impacts the direction of invention disclosure strategies at the firm level. Specifically, firms experiencing a competitive threat in the patent market might strategically disclose less similar patents. This study suggests that firms systematically increase differentiation (reduce similarity) both compared to the primary litigated patent and their own earlier patents. However, PAEs may have a weaker effect than product companies. The results imply that product market peers are more relevant than PAEs in determining firms' invention strategies. Chapter 3 constructs a conceptual framework to describe the decision-making process behind innovation disclosure and empirically examines the factors that impact the corporate innovation disclosure strategy in financial documents of publicly listed firms. This study finds that firms would like to disclose more innovation information directly to the shareholders to expand access to external financing or to drive the direction of innovation in the technology field and encourage other market players to imitate their innovation outcomes. Firms are more likely to disclose less innovation information to hide the adverse information or to avoid the costs of revealing proprietary information to competitors in a highly competitive market unless the cost is low.2024-06-0