The paper builds a tractable model of patent pools, agreements among patent owners to license sets of their patents. It provides a necessary and sufficient condition for patent pools to enhance welfare and shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing. The paper allows patents to differ in importance, asymmetric blocking patterns, and licensors to also be licensees. We undertake some initial exploration of the impact of pools on innovation. The analysis has broader applicability than pools, being relevant to a number of co-marketing arrangements.

Reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs) have received increased public scrutiny but attracted little systematic study. We collect a comprehensive sample of 526 RLBOs between 1981 and 2003 and examine the three-year and five-year stock performance of these offerings. RLBOs appear to perform as well as or better than other initial public offerings and the stock market as a whole, depending on the specification. Evidence exists of a deterioration of returns over time.

We show that inflows of capital into venture funds increase the valuation of these funds’ new investments. This effect is robust to (i) controlling for firm characteristics and public market valuations, (ii) examining first differences, and (iii) using inflows into leveraged buyout funds as an instrumental variable. Interaction terms suggest that the impact of venture capital inflows on prices is greatest in states with the most venture capital activity. Changes in valuations do not appear related to the ultimate success of these firms. The findings are consistent with competition for a limited number of attractive investments being responsible for rising prices.

How do individuals decide to become entrepreneurs and learn to make optimal entrepreneurial decisions? The concentration of entrepreneurs in regions such as Silicon Valley has stimulated research and policy interest into the influence of peers, but the causal effect is hard to identify empirically. We exploit the exogenous assignment of students into business-school sections to identify the causal effect of entrepreneurial peers. We show that, in contrast to prior findings, a higher share of entrepreneurial peers decreases, rather than increases, entrepreneurship. The decrease is driven by a reduction in unsuccessful entrepreneurial ventures; the effect on successful ventures is significantly more positive.

A major policy issue in standard setting is that patents that are ex ante not that important, by being included into a standard, may become standard-essential patents. In an attempt to curb the monopoly power that they create, most standard-setting organizations require the owners of patents covered by the standard to make a loose commitment to grant licenses on reasonable terms. Such commitments unsurprisingly are conducive to litigation. This paper builds a framework for the analysis of these patents, identifies several types of inefficiencies attached to the lack of price commitments, and shows how structured price commitments restore competition and why such commitments may not arise spontaneously in the marketplace.

Using previously unexplored custodial data, we examine alternative investment vehicles (AVs) in private equity (PE) funds over the last four decades. By 2017, AVs reached 40% of all PE commitments. Average AV performance matches the PE market, but underperforms the main funds of the partnerships sponsoring the AVs. Limited partners (LPs) with better past performance invest in AVs with better average performance, even after conditioning on the general partners’ (GPs’) past records. This result is largely driven by preferential access of top LPs to top AVs. Returns in PE increasingly depend on the match between GPs and LPs and both parties’ outside options.