The Case Against Federalizing Trade Secrecy

Seaman, Christopher B.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2397567

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 81 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Second, the paper contributes to the debate on secrecy, by documenting one of its social costs, namely a loss of follow-on inventions. Recent legislative changes in the United States, such as the expansion of prior user rights defense to patent infringement with the AIA (Khamin, 2014) and the adoption of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act by an increasing number of U.S. states (Seaman, 2015), have strengthened the incentives to keep inventions secret. Although the present paper is silent on whether the incentives are too (or not enough) skewed towards secrecy, it does highlight one social cost of secrecy (see also Ganglmair and Reimers, 2019).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Patents Enable Disclosure? Evidence from the Invention Secrecy Act

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper provides novel empirical evidence that patents enable knowledge disclosure.The analysis exploits the Invention Secrecy Act, which grants the U.S. Commissioner for Patents the right to prevent disclosure of new inventions that represent a threat to national security. Using a two-level matching approach, we document a negative and large relationship between the enforcement of a secrecy order and follow-on inventions, as captured with patent citations and text-based measures of invention similarity. The effect of secrecy orders is particularly salient for geographically-distant parties and for inventions in the same technological field as the secreted patent.JEL codes: O31, O33, O34

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Patents Enable Disclosure? Evidence from the Invention Secrecy Act

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Not surprisingly, the adoption of the IDD reduces the turnover likelihood of those employees who have access to trade secrets (Seaman 2015). Such employees play an important role in firms' operations, offering invaluable and sometimes irreplaceable human capital to the firm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Employee turnover likelihood and earnings management: evidence from the inevitable disclosure doctrine

Gao

Zhang

2018

Rev Account Stud

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present evidence that managers consider employee turnover likelihood in their accounting choices. Our tests exploit U.S. state courts' staggered recognition of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), which reduces employees' ability to switch employers. We find a significant decrease in upward earnings management for firms headquartered in states that recognize the IDD, relative to firms headquartered elsewhere. The effect of the IDD is stronger for firms relying more on human capital and for firms whose employees have higher ex-ante turnover likelihood, confirming the employee retention channel. Overall, our results support the view that retaining employees is an important motive for corporate earnings management.

show abstract