The Government as Venture Capitalist: The Long-Run Effects of the SBIR Program

Public programs to provide early-stage financing to firms, particularly high-technology companies, have become commonplace in the United States and abroad. The long-run effectiveness of these programs, however, has attracted little empirical scrutiny. This paper examines the impact of the largest U.S. public venture capital initiative, the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which has provided over $6 billion to small high-technology firms between 1983 and 1995. Using a unique database" of awardees compiled by the U.S. General Accounting Office, I show that SBIR awardees grew significantly faster than a matched set of firms over a ten-year period. The positive effects of SBIR awards were confined to firms based in zip codes with substantial venture capital activity. The findings are consistent with both the corporate finance literature on capital constraints and the growth literature on the importance of localization effects.

Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years

The paper seeks to understand the impact of the patent system on innovation by examining shifts in the strength of patent protection across sixty countries and a 150-year period. An examination of 177 policy changes reveals that strengthening patent protection appears to have few positive effects on patent applications by entities in the country undertaking the policy change, whether filings in Great Britain or the nation making the policy change are considered. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that the impact of patent protection-enhancing shifts were greater in nations with weaker initial protection and greater economic development, consistent with economic theory. I address concerns about the endogeneity of these changes by employing an instrumental variable approach.

Innovation and Incentives: Evidence from Corporate R&D

Beginning in the late 1980s, American corporations began increasingly linking the compensation of central research personnel to the economic objectives of the corporation. This paper examines the impact of the shifting compensation of the heads of corporate research and development. Among firms with centralized R&D organizations, a clear relationship emerges: more long-term incentives (e.g. stock options and restricted stock) are associated with more heavily cited patents. These incentives also appear to be somewhat associated with more patent filings and patents of greater generality. We address endogeniety concerns in a variety of ways, including examining the impact of compensation for other key managers and utilizing an instrument based on spawning activity in the region. While we cannot determine whether the effect is due to better project selection or better people selection, the results continue to be consistent with our interpretation that performance pay of corporate R&D heads is associated with more innovative firms.

Transaction Structures in the Developing World

While variations in public securities markets across nations have attracted increasing scrutiny, private financings have received little attention. But in developing nations, the bulk of financings are private ones. This paper analyzes 210 private equity transactions in developing countries. We find that unlike in the U.S., where convertible preferred securities are ubiquitous, in developing nations a much broader array of securities are employed and private equity investors often have fewer contractual protections. The choice of security appears to be driven by the legal and economic circumstances of the nation and the private equity group. Investments in common law nations are structured similar to those in the U.S., being less likely to employ common stock or straight debt, and more likely to use preferred stock with a variety of covenants. By way of contrast, in nations where the rule of law is less established, private equity groups are likely to use common stock and own the majority of the firm's equity if the investment encounters difficulties. Private equity groups based in the U.S. and U.K. rely more on preferred securities but also adapt transactions to local conditions. These contractual differences appear to have real consequences: larger transactions with higher valuations are seen in common law countries. These findings suggest that the structure of a country's legal system affects private contracts and cannot easily be undone by (bi-lateral) private solutions.

Efficient Patent Pools

The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and suñcient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing, a property that allows the antitrust authorities to use this requirement to screen out unattractive pools. The paper then undertakes a number of extensions. It evaluates the external test' according to which patents with substitutes should not be included in a pool; analyzes the welfare implications of the reduction in the members' incentives to invent around or challenge the validity of each other's patents; looks at the rationale for the (common) provision of automatic assignment of future related patents to the pool; and, last, studies the intellectual property owners' incentives to form a pool or to cross-license when they themselves are users of the patents in the pool.

Links and Hyperlinks: An Empirical Analysis of Internet Portal Alliances, 1995-1999

This paper examines the structure of over 100 alliances by Internet portals from 1995 to 1999. These alliances were an attractive empirical testing ground because of the large number and heterogeneous nature of the contracts, the high standards for disclosure in the industry, and the careful delineation of ownership, control, exclusivity, and other provisions in the contracts. The division of ownership and allocation of control rights displayed patterns consistent with the predictions in the incomplete contracting literature. Similarly, the exclusivity of the agreements appeared to vary, at least weakly, with the value of the product or service being made available to the portal, consistent with the licensing literature. In other cases, particularly in regard to the differing allocation of ownership and control and the varying completeness of the contracts, the empirical patterns indicated a more complex world than the one that theory led us to anticipate.

Does Venture Capital Spur Innovation?

While policymakers often assume venture capital has a profound impact on innovation, that premise has not been evaluated systematically. We address this omission by examining the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades. We address concerns about causality in several ways, including exploiting a 1979 policy shift that spurred venture capital fundraising. We find that the amount of venture capital activity in an industry significantly increases its rate of patenting. While the ratio of venture capital to R&D has averaged less than 3% in recent years, our estimates suggest that venture capital accounts for about 15% of industrial innovations. We address concerns that these results are an artifact of our use of patent counts by demonstrating similar patterns when other measures of innovation are used in a sample of 530 venture-backed and non-venture-backed firms.