Current research

Under review. 

“Directed Technical Change: When Substitution Leads to Regret.”

with Biggi G., Giuliani E., and Martinelli A.

Paper presented at the DRUID 2025, Concordi 2025 and GEOINNO 2026 conferences.

Working paper available here.

We study the impact of the 2004 Stockholm Convention, which globally banned twelve highly toxic persistent organic pollutants (POPs), on chemical innovation. By combining patent data with computational chemistry measures of toxicity and environmental persistence, we analyze the properties of patented compounds. We find no evidence that the ban stimulated innovation toward safer alternatives. Instead, it increased patenting of substitute compounds that display POP-like characteristics, including high toxicity and persistence, despite not being covered by the ban. These results indicate that environmental regulation may redirect innovation toward formally compliant but equally dangerous technologies.

Under review. 

“From Open Warfare to Strawman's Anonymity: 

Strategic Motives for Concealing Identity in Patent Opposition at the EPO”. 

with Bekkers R. and Martinelli A.

Paper presented at the 9th ZEW/MaCCI, EPIP 2023 and DRUID 2024 conferences.

Patent opposition allows firms to challenge newly granted patents, but doing so openly creates a trade-off between invalidating a patent and disclosing strategic information. To overcome this dilemma, firms increasingly choose to oppose anonymously via the use of a strawman, a route allowed at the European Patent Office (EPO). This paper investigates the determinants of strawman opposition. To overcome the challenge that any observations of strawman are by definition indirect, we combine in-depth interviews with patent attorneys with the analysis of a large-scale dataset of oppositions at the EPO. Despite the fact that anonymous oppositions reduce the chances of success, their use is nevertheless increasing. We find that firms resort to strawmen when they are still unknown to the patent owner (off the radar), and that this behaviour is not driven by concerns about retaliation from litigious patent owners. We furthermore find that anonymity is more likely to be used in fields with dense patent thickets, where firms need to maintain amicable relationships for licensing negotiations. But if the relation is already adversarial, this effect disappears - then there is less to lose by being identified. These insights link the literature on patent opposition and patent quality with the literature on strategic disclosure. 

Under review. 

“Wages and employment in the green transition: firm-level evidence from the global automotive industry”. 

with Rughi T. and Virgillito M.E.

This paper examines wage and employment dynamics following the acceleration of climate policies in the global automotive industry, a sector central to current decarbonization efforts. Using firm-level data from the ORBIS database for the period 2014-2022 and a difference-in-differences design, we exploit the 2019 regulatory regime shift as a common shock, comparing firms with different propensities to green innovation. Green-propensity firms are defined as firms holding at least one patent related to climate change mitigation technologies. We detect no systematic difference in employment growth between firms. By contrast, green-propensity firms experience an accelerated wage compression, reflected in negative wage growth after 2019. These results are robust across alternative specifications, including inverse probability weighting to address potential selection bias. The wage compression effect is particularly pronounced among North American automotive manufacturers. Overall, our results challenge the framework of the just transition in the context of automotive decarbonization.

Work in progress. 

As part of the PRIN PNRR project "Breakthrough innovation and learning by failure in the medical device industry". 

“Beyond Success: The Impact of Innovation Failures and Coping Strategies in the Medical Device Industry”. 

with Martinelli A., Minischetti E., and Murgia G. 

Paper presented at the DRUID 2025, R&D Management 2025, SIE 2025 and SIEPI 2026, AilG 2026 conferences. 

This study examines the impact of medical device (MD) recalls—a form of product failure—on firms' subsequent innovation and product development. Using a novel dataset of approved medical devices and recalls at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States from 2002 to 2021, complemented by firm- and patent-level data, we examine how firms adjust their strategic behavior in response to recalls.  To this end, we construct a concordance table linking the product classes used by the FDA to the International Patent Classification (IPC) system. Our findings indicate that recalls lead to a notable decline in innovation and product development within the recalled product class. Furthermore, we find that firms’ degree of product diversification plays a positive moderating role in mitigating these negative effects. These results underscore the nuanced relationship between product failures and innovation and  highlight the role of product diversification in enhancing firms’ resilience.

Work in progress. 

“Social norms or informal know how trading? Knowledge transfer among haute cousine chefs”. 

with Danna R., Martinelli A., and Nuvolari A.

Paper presented at the EPIP 2024 conference. 

Cooking recipes are not effectively protected by intellectual property (IP) law. Standard theory predicts that weak appropriability should reduce incentives to innovate, yet haute cuisine remains a highly creative and innovative sector. This paper contributes to the literature on “negative intellectual property space” by reassessing the mechanisms that sustain knowledge exchange among chefs. Using survey data collected in 2022–2023 from Italian restaurants listed in the Michelin Guide, we combine network analysis with a scenario-based experiment involving more than 230 chefs. We map collaboration and information-exchange networks to characterize the context of knowledge sharing and examine whether knowledge transfer is driven by compliance with informal IP-like norms or by expectations of reciprocity, and whether these effects vary across network positions. We find that knowledge-sharing intentions are primarily driven by expectations of reciprocity, but this effect diminishes for structurally central actors. Overall, the findings underscore how reciprocity and network structure jointly sustain innovation in the absence of formal intellectual property protection.