David Angenendt

SKEMA Business School

60 rue Fédor Dostoïevski

06902 Sophia Antipolis, France

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at SKEMA Business School, based at the Sophia Antipolis campus and a member of the Knowledge, Technology and Organization (KTO) research centre. My research lies at the intersection of innovation economics, intellectual property, and industrial organisation. In current projects, I study trade secrets and vertical contracts, patent and disclosure policy, the measurement of innovation using patent data, and firms’ engagement with universities.

I am also a Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. Before joining SKEMA, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Technical University of Munich. I received my PhD in Economics from the University of Bologna in 2019.

news

Sep 16, 2026	Our paper Exclusive Secrets, with Giacomo Calzolari and Alireza Naghavi, on how weak trade-secret protection narrows suppliers’ buyer networks, was accepted at the Journal of the European Economic Association. We summarise the findings in a VoxEU column.
Aug 24, 2026	I joined SKEMA Business School as Assistant Professor of Economics, based at the Sophia Antipolis campus.
Jun 01, 2026	Our team-science study comparing human-only, AI-assisted, and AI-led research teams on assessing reproducibility appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
May 06, 2026	Our field-experiment paper with Ammon Salter on firms’ knowledge sourcing from universities was accepted at Research Policy.

selected work

JEEA

Exclusive Secrets

with Giacomo Calzolari and Alireza Naghavi

Journal of the European Economic Association (forthcoming), 2026

When trade-secret protection is weak, manufacturers keep suppliers exclusive to limit who else they can sell to in order to protect sensitive know-how. Evidence from global automotive-parts contracts, where this link is strongest for moderately specialised components.

Abs DOI SSRN CEPR Blog Code Slides

We investigate the effects of trade secret (TS) protection on supplier exclusivity in vertical industrial relations. We show that manufacturers limit their suppliers’ buyer networks under weak TS protection to safeguard sensitive information while encouraging supplier investment. Using worldwide automotive parts contracts data, we find that weak TS protection constrains suppliers to serve only a few Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), sometimes leading to exclusivity, especially for parts with intermediate relationship-specificity. This association strengthens with greater OEM bargaining power, aligning with theoretical insights. We validate these findings by examining supplier attributes, including size, cartel involvement, and ownership structure.
RP

Do Firms Report More University Knowledge Sourcing When Informed About Engagement Channels? Evidence from a Field Experiment

with Ammon Salter

Research Policy, 2026

Simply reminding firms of the many ways they can work with universities makes them 34% more likely to report universities as a source of innovation, with implications for how innovation surveys are designed.

Abs DOI PDF Supp Code

Does providing information about a wide range of university engagement channels influence the likelihood that companies report that they source knowledge from universities in their innovative efforts? To address this question, we embedded a field experiment in a multi-wave survey on university engagement that randomly exposed firms to information about a variety of engagement channels before asking about knowledge sources for innovation. We find that exposure to these channels significantly increases the likelihood of firms reporting universities as a knowledge source. The magnitude of this effect is substantial, with the propensity to report sourcing knowledge from universities increasing by 34% in our preferred estimate. This increase is concentrated among firms rating universities as of ‘low’ or ‘medium’ importance and among those firms with some university engagement. We discuss the implications for understanding university-industry engagement and the design of innovation surveys.

WP

The Private Costs of Legal Uncertainty: Evidence from the Unified Patent Court

2025

Working paper

Estimates the economic cost of legal uncertainty using the introduction of the EU’s Unified Patent Court. Rather than accept an untested jurisdiction, many patentees chose the established national route, forgoing savings of roughly EUR 100 million, or about EUR 10,000 per patent.

Abs Poster Slides

"Legal certainty" signifies the certainty of economic agents about the meaning and enforceability of legal rules and the procedures for resolving legal disputes. It has been considered a cornerstone of market economies for centuries, yet it remains challenging to quantify. This paper leverages the introduction of the Unitary Patent (UP) system in the European Union as an exogenous shock that exposed patentees to uncertainty about the new Unified Patent Court (UPC). While the reform aims to reduce the cost of maintaining patents across multiple European countries, the established system of national validations (EP) remains available. Patentees can thus "pay" to avoid UPC jurisdiction by opting for national validations. We calculate that patentees who retained the national route despite possible savings forfeited approximately EUR 100 million, while those who accepted simultaneous UPC jurisdiction left EUR 65 million in savings "on the table". On a per-patent basis, this equates to around EUR 10,000 per grant and EUR 25,000 per patentee. For patentees with a long history of maintaining European patents, I estimate that the average patentee requires fee savings of EUR 4,000-6,000 per patent to be indifferent between the UP and EP routes. I disaggregate part of these costs of the UPC route into expectations about litigation costs, litigation outcomes, and the importance of patent licensing, and find considerable heterogeneity in the remaining baseline cost between patentees from different UP member countries.
WP

Competition and the Strategic Disclosure of Innovation: Theory and Evidence from Patent Applications

with Bernhard Ganglmair

2025

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper No. 664

A firm with a pending patent application must decide whether to disclose it early. Doing so reveals information that shapes how rivals respond, both in how aggressively they compete in the product market and in whether they scale back or step up their own R&D. Whether it pays off depends on the competitive setting, with evidence from patent disclosures in company press releases.

Abs Preprint Slides

We develop a duopoly signaling model in which an innovative leader strategically announces a pending patent application to influence the follower’s behavior, both in the product market (in the short run) and in R&D (with effects in the long run). Our model captures different competitive structures by representing market competition in reduced form, thereby encompassing competition in both strategic substitutes and strategic complements with varying intensities. Extending the conventional wisdom of the optimality of disclosure under strategic substitutes, our model predicts some disclosure for low competition intensities under strategic complements when the follower’s R&D project is technologically less similar to the leader’s, and no disclosure even under strategic substitutes when competitors’ R&D exhibits high similarities. We provide empirical support for the model’s core predictions by identifying patent disclosures in press releases and using a technique from the corporate finance literature to measure the nature of market competition.