Responses:
*Josh's first and fourth comments appear somewhat disingenuous. We made a great play of how it was important to isolate public-to-private transactions and not mix them as he has done. Mixing provides the opposite results, which is good press for the industry... So let's ignore thosecomments.
*We address an outlier firm without naming it on page 23 ("One firm held 426 patents...") and page 28 ("Our mean sell-off statistic includes, but is not driven by, a single leveraged buyout selling 798 patents – this is the same firm that went on to have 426 patents by the end of the year
of its buyout, shown in Table 4."). Going through the data, this firm is OWEN-ILLINOIS INC, and the sale was of 767 patents, not 798. Seagate is in the original dataset as SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY PLC (gvkey=150937) and SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY-OLD (gvkey=9545). Neither of these records are marked as having had an LBO. We should look at the source data to see if there is some reason why Seagate isn't in our dataset.
*The comment on sample sizes and explaining details is fair. We need to be clearer about what the unit of observation is when we report results.
*Yes, we can look at R&D filings and we did, we just didn't include it in the write-up. The results are in Graphs-Edited.xlsx
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