Publications

Patent Thickets and Mergers and Acquisitions (with Logan Emery) 

• Forthcoming at The Review of Corporate Finance Studies

  • We examine how patent thickets - clusters of interdependent patents that increase coordination and bargaining costs - shape acquisition decisions. Firms are less likely to be acquired when embedded in external thickets but more likely when their patents form internal thickets that consolidate control. When acquirers and targets share an external thicket, acquisition likelihood rises if the acquirer depends on the target and falls when the dependence runs in the opposite direction.

• SSRN link to paper

• Featured on Columbia Law School blog

• GitHub link to patent-SDC match data

Measuring Firms' Capability to Absorb External Knowledge (with M. Deniz Yavuz)

• Journal of Financial Economics, 2026, 183, 104322

  • We develop a patent-based measure of firms’ capability to leverage external knowledge - absorption intensity - and validate it using the exogenous increase in patent disclosure caused by the American Inventors Protection Act. Our results show that firms with higher absorption intensity experience greater gains in innovation and growth.

  • GitHub link to absorption intensity data

Price-Path Convexity and Short-Horizon Return Predictability (with Huseyin Gulen)

• Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2026, 61 (2), 547-579

  • We document a strong negative relation between the curvature of stock price paths (i.e., price-path convexity) and future short-horizon returns at both the aggregate and firm levels. This relation obtains regardless of the cumulative return during the convexity estimation period. Using survey-based expectations of short-horizon returns, we provide evidence that the negative relation between convexity and future returns is driven in part by overextrapolation of past short-horizon returns.

  • GitHub link to convexity data

Small Innovators: No risk, No return (with Noah Stoffman and M. Deniz Yavuz) 

• • Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2022, 74 (1), 101492

    • We find that small innovators (small firms with recent patent grants) earn higher future returns than small non-innovators. These returns are driven by risk, not underreaction due to information processing costs. Small innovators are riskier because of their reliance on external funding and strategic alliances.

    • GitHub link to patent-CRSP permco match data 

Using Patent Capital to Estimate Tobin's Q 

• • Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2022, 57 (8), 2899-2928

    • I construct a new proxy for Tobin's Q that incorporates the replacement cost of patent capital. This proxy, which I call patent Q, explains up to 31% more variation in investment than the standard proxy for Q and up to 62% more variation in investment than total Q of Peters and Taylor (2017). Controlling for patent Q leads to larger, not smaller, cash flow coefficients. 

    • GitHub link to patent q data