The doctoral thesis will be a cumulative dissertation and will consist of several papers.

The first project investigates the role of patents in the financing of start-up companies. Using detailed firm-level panel data of German start-up companies, it will be determined whether patents can be a way to mitigate financial constraints. Thereby we identify a firm’s demand for different sources of external finance and directly measure financial constraints. Approximations of patent values based on matched information from the PATSTAT database are used to distinguish high-value patents and to investigate the impact of patenting activities in a more differentiated manner.

 

The second research project investigates the relationship between the protection of IPRs and the global sourcing decisions of German multinational enterprises. To investigate the impact of IPRs on FDI, the firm-level “Microdatabase Direct Investment” from the Deutsche Bundesbank is used. Following the empirical strategy of Branstetter et al. (2011) for American multinationals, well-documented discrete changes in patent regimes over the last 30 years, incorporated in an index of worldwide patent reforms (Branstetter et al., 2006) are used to identify the effect of patent reforms. Additionally the Ginarte-Park Index (Ginarte and Park, 1997 and Park, 2008) will be used to approximate the general strength of IPRs.