新葡京官方

题目：Innovation and Firm Dynamics with Patent Wars

时间：2026年7月6日10：00-12:00

地点：明德主楼729

汇报人：Mark Rempel  多伦多大学新葡京官方 助理教授

主持人：王霞教授

个人简介：

Mark Rempel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto working at the intersection of macroeconomics, finance and firm dynamics. His core research agenda assesses the long-term, net economic distortions induced by economies increasingly organized around intangible (idea-based) assets. Methodologically he follows a micro-to-macro, quantitative approach to appropriately aggregate the response of heterogeneous agents in general equilibrium. Recent research centers on evaluating firms’ increasing market power and superstar dominance impacts on aggregate productivity examining institutional and market forces including uncertain enforcement in the patent system, weakened value of public equity markets, decreased anti-trust enforcement, and increased contract rights on intellectual property licensing.

His work has been published in some of the top economics journal outlets including the Review of Economic Studies, been awarded 1st prize in various best paper competitions, and over $100K in research grants and supports. Professor Rempel received a jointly awarded PhD in Economics and Finance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin School of Business in 2022. Prior to his PhD, Professor Rempel worked as an economist and financial analyst in the Bank of Canada. He also holds master's degrees in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, and an Honours Bachelor from McGill University with a double major in Economics and Mathematics.

讲座摘要：

Are ideas becoming harder to protect? I study firm’s intellectual property protection (IPP) efforts in shaping uncertain court patent enforcement and entry barriers. I posit a dual role of IPP investments in simultaneously protecting existing quasi-monopoly rents and facilitating business stealing in rival’s product markets. Large, innovative, ‘superstar’ firms endogenously arise from greater IPP investment incentives tied to their higher existing market power and IPP investment efficiencies from having in-house legal teams. Leveraging a novel, large-scale firm-matched patent portfolio and IP litigation event dataset, I find strong evidence supporting this mechanism and value of firm investments into shaping patent enforcement. A structural estimation suggests that enforcement asymmetries are quantitatively large and can significantly account for the superstar phenomenon. Moreover, despite the aggregate effect on growth and welfare being ambiguous in the framework, the counterfactual results suggests that natural impediments to copying are sufficiently high, so existing patent rights and litigation activities are significantly inhibiting productivity growth and harming consumer welfare.