Prof. Laurie Ciaramella, Ph.D.

Articles in Refereed Journals

Ciaramella, Laurie (2023). Taxation and the Transfer of Patents: Evidence from Europe, European Economic Review 151. DOI

• I study how taxes affect firms’ incentives to shift the location of intangible assets. Using firm-level data on patent reassignments, I exploit variations in statutory tax rates and the introduction of “patent box” policies as shocks modifying incentives to transfer patents across countries. The results suggest a large impact of taxes on asset shifting between affiliates, increasing with expected patent income, and driven by very large firms. Patent boxes are persistently associated with more incoming and less outgoing patent relocations between affiliates. These findings suggest that taxes provide firms with incentives to shift income via patent relocation, and advocate for considering patent transfer strategies in tax policy.
• Also published as Working Paper

Ciaramella, Laurie; De Rassenfosse, Gaétan (2018). Distance and the Timing of Licensing, Academy of Management Proceedings, 2018 (1). DOI

• We study the effect of geographical distance between the contracting parties on the timing of the licensing deal. Using insights from the transaction costs theory, we argue that geographical distance increases the search, information and contracting costs. We investigate this question using a novel dataset of licensing deals in France, containing geo-localization of parties together with detailed demographic and patent information. To identity the effect of geographical distance as a market friction, we control for the confounding determinants of the timing of the transaction. Because of the possibility that firms with similar interests may gather in business clusters, we argue that it is also important to control for the market and technology characteristics of the parties. We find that geographic distance delays the transaction, and that this effect is strong for SMEs. We also find market proximity to be a significant delayer of the licensing transaction. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of a local characteristic to markets for technology, which are usually seen as global.

Ciaramella, Laurie; Martínez, Catalina; Ménière, Yann (2017). Tracking Patent Transfers in Different European Countries: Methods and a First Application to Medical Technologies, Scientometrics, 112 (2), 817-850. DOI

• Drawing on more than half a million granted patents in all technological sectors filed at EPO between 1998 and 2012 we gather information on 300,000 inscriptions affecting changes in their ownership at the EPO and top national registers (France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain). After grouping parallel legal events in different European validation countries, we find that more than 30% of EPO patents in all fields change ownership at least once. For the field of medical technologies, we exploit additional information on corporate structures to further distinguish between “intragroup” and “bare” changes of ownership thanks. Our results indicate that more than two-thirds of the transfers happen “intragroup”, that is between related corporate entities. Using regressions analyses, we finally explore and discuss relations between the occurrence and types of these transfers of patent and proxies for patent quality.

Contributions to Collected Editions

Ciaramella, Laurie; Rassenfosse, Gaétan de; Seliger, Florian (2022). Sources of Knowledge Flow between Developed and Developing Countries, in: Antony Taubman, Jayashree Watal (eds.), Trade in Knowledge. Intellectual Property, Trade and Development in a Transformed Global Economy, 265-292. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI

Further Publications, Press Articles, Interviews

Ciaramella, Laurie; Maraut, Stéphane; Martinez, Catalina; Ménière, Yann (2016). The Market for European Patents. Report to the French Patent Office. Courbevoie: L'Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI).

Discussion Papers

Ciaramella, Laurie; Heller, David; Leitzinger, Leo (2023). Intellectual Property as Loan Collateral. DOI

• This study provides a first comprehensive picture of the use of intellectual property (IP) as loan collateral, its determinants, and its effect on firm trajectories. Using novel administrative data, we exploit the French institutional setting and show that firms from diverse industries use selected trademarks (72%), patents (26%), and designs (2%) to secure loans. We find that IP pledges have large positive effects on debt financing, in particular for small, financially constrained firms. The results are robust to exogenous variation in the pledgeability of alternative collateral. Further, using IP as loan collateral is associated with sizable increases in firm-level growth.

de Rassenfosse, Gaétan; Ciaramella, Laurie (2022). Physical Constraints on Markets for Ideas.

• This paper analyzes how travel time between contracting parties slows down transactions on markets for ideas. We put forward a model of buyer-seller trade over ideas and test the model’s predictions on a novel dataset of patent sales and licensing deals in France. To address endogeneity concerns, we construct an instrument that exploits the 1982 Deferre law, which marked the beginning of territorial decentralization in France, and the introduction of high-speed train lines. We also instrument travel time with horseback travel time around 1780. We find robust evidence that travel time delays transactions on markets for ideas to a sizeable extent, especially for deals involving SMEs and first-time buyer-seller dyads.
• Available at SSRN

Ciaramella, Laurie; Gaessler, Fabian; Hall, Bronwyn H.; Harhoff, Dietmar (2019). Patent Transfers and Patent Citations, HAL archives ouvertes, No. hal-02307096.

Baron, Justus; Ciaramella, Laurie (2019). The Markets for Standard Essential Patents.

Ciaramella, Laurie; de Rassenfosse, Gaétan (2019). Geography and the Markets for Technology.

Ciaramella, Laurie (2019). Taxation and the Transfer of Patents.

• Also published in European Economic Review, Volume 151, January 2023, 104312

Ciaramella, Laurie (2017). Patent Boxes and the Relocation of Intellectual Property. DOI

• Firms can make use of the discretionary aspect of the location of patent ownership to avoid taxation and maximise their profits. This paper investigates patent transfers with regard to patent box regimes, and study how firms' incentives to relocate patents vary with the heterogeneity of the features of such regimes. Using a comprehensive dataset on international patent transfers, I find that patent box countries significantly attract more patent relocations, and that incoming flows increase in the tax rebate. The fiscal incentives are stronger in countries with a high R&D level, suggesting multiple dimensions in firms' decisions of patent relocation. This is all the more true for more valuable patents. I distinguish between intra-group relocation and patent trade. The results indicate that policy makers could tweak the designs of patent box regimes and the stringency of the rules governing patent transfers to deter relocation driven solely by fiscal optimization motives. Finally, I propose a novel instrument to address the potential endogeneity of R&D expenditures.