David Tobias Angenendt
Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer,
Department of Economics & Policy,
TUM School of Management,
Technical University of Munich
Research fields: Industrial Organization, Innovation Economics, Intellectual Property
Contact email: david.angenendt@gmail.com
In 2025–26 I am available for tenure-track positions in economics, innovation, and related fields.
Direct links to my application materials:
Title: "Exclusive Secrets"
Co-authored with Giacomo Calzolari and Alireza Naghavi; I have contributed the empirical design, data construction, and economic interpretation
Current status: conditionally accepted in Journal of the European Economic Association
Summary:
The paper studies how firms protect knowledge when legal secrecy is imperfect. It links an incomplete-contracting model to evidence from global automotive supply networks and shows that weaker trade-secret environments prompt OEMs to adopt exclusive supplier relationships to safeguard knowledge, particularly when inputs exhibit moderate relationship specificity. The mechanism explains how legal institutions tilt vertical contracting and, through that channel, competition.
Research overview:
My research examines how intellectual property, information asymmetries, and legal institutions shape firms’ innovation and disclosure decisions. I combine applied microeconometrics, simple theory, and original datasets to generate evidence that is useful for innovation and competition policy.
A first line of work studies strategic behaviour under IP and information asymmetry, with a focus on how firms use contractual and disclosure choices to manage knowledge flows. My job market paper links an incomplete-contracting view of trade-secret protection to global automotive supply networks, showing how weaker secrecy environments induce OEMs to rely more on exclusive supplier relationships. Related work analyses disclosure around pending patents and the market consequences of these choices. A second, closely related line examines the design of policy for innovation incentives. Here, my sole-authored work quantifies firms’ willingness to pay to avoid legal uncertainty in Europe’s Unified Patent Court, using firms’ patenting choices to infer the private costs of institutional change.
A third line of work develops empirical tools and data for innovation research. This includes a 2025 article in Economic Inquiry on patent-based innovation measures for heterogeneous country samples and ongoing work on open data assets such as indicators for "prophetic patents". A fourth line studies knowledge diffusion and university-industry links using survey evidence. In this stream, a paper (2nd round R&R) tests how informing firms about engagement channels affects their reporting of university knowledge sourcing.
Publications and working papers:
Published:
"Mitigating technology gaps' contribution to international income inequality", with Franco Mariuzzo and Junjun Zhang, Economic Inquiry, 2025. Open Access.
The paper proposes and evaluates patent-based measures of technology gaps and studies how these gaps relate to international income differences
Under review:
"Exclusive Secrets", with Giacomo Calzolari and Alireza Naghavi, conditionally accepted in Journal of the European Economic Association, 2025. Submitted as my job market paper. Previously circulated as CEPR Discussion Paper 18977.
The paper studies how firms protect knowledge when legal secrecy is imperfect (see above for more details).
"Do Firms Report More University Knowledge Sourcing When Informed About Engagement Channels? Evidence from a Field Experiment", with Ammon Salter, R&R (round 2) at Research Policy. Pre-print version available here.
A field experiment with firms that tests whether informing them about engagement channels changes how they report universities as knowledge sources.
Working papers:
"Competition and the Strategic Disclosure of Innovation: Theory and Evidence from Patent Applications", with Bernhard Ganglmair, circulated as CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper No. 664.
Theory and evidence on how firms use patent disclosure strategically in response to competitive pressure.
“The Private Costs of Legal Uncertainty: Evidence from the Unified Patent Court”. Latest public version (June 2025) available at upc.datanecon.org.
Estimates the private costs of legal uncertainty around the Unified Patent Court by comparing firms’ patenting decisions under the old and new regimes.
Teaching:
Primary instructor for two modules at TUM School of Management, including full responsibility for syllabus design, lectures, and assessment:
Economics of Technology & Innovation (BSc)
Economics of Digital Platforms (MSc)
Previous teaching experience as TA in microeconomics, industrial organization, and related subjects at Bologna, SAIS Europe, and Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Formal pedagogy training through the TUM "Foundations of University Teaching" programme.
Student evaluations in my current courses are consistently very positive; a detailed summary, sample materials, and grade distributions are documented in my teaching dossier.
Find more details on my dedicated teaching page.
References:
Prof. Hanna Hottenrott, TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich; ZEW Mannheim
Prof. Alan Hughes, Imperial Business School; Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge
Prof. Alireza Naghavi, Graduate School of Econmoics, Kyoto University; University of Bologna
Last updated: 2 December 2025