摘要
Patent thickets, a phenomenon of fragmented ownership of overlapping patent rights, hamper firms' commercialization of patents and thus deliver asset pricing implications. We show that firms with deeper patent thickets are involved inmore patent litigations, launch fewer new products, and become less profitable in the future. These firms are also associatedwith lower subsequent stock returns,which can be explained by a conditional Capital Asset PricingModel (CAPM) based on a general equilibrium model that features heterogeneous market betas conditional on time-varying aggregate productivity. This explanation is supported by further evidence fromfactor regressions and stochastic discount factor tests.