Fabian Gaessler

Fabian Gaessler

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Business at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

I do empirical research on innovation, intellectual property, science, and technological change.

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Portrait of Fabian Gaessler

News

Talks
  • Summer School on Data and Algorithms for Science, Technology & Innovation Studies (SKEMA, Nice), presenter, 7 September
  • EPIP conference (Turin), board member, 9–11 September
  • CEIPI Diploma on Patent Litigation in Europe (Strasbourg), round table participant, 2 October
  • InnoPat conference (ZEW Mannheim), keynote speaker, 4–6 November
  • NBER Innovation Information Initiative Technical Working Group (Cambridge, MA), presenter, 4–5 December
  • KU Leuven, invited seminar, February 2027
  • Collège de France, invited seminar, March 2027
Jun 2026

Awarded a Leonardo Grant as Principal Investigator for the project “Mapping the Problem Space of Innovation.”

Feb 2026

“Filling the Gap: The Consequences of Collaborator Loss in Corporate R&D” is published in Management Science.

Current research

All current research

Limits to the Division of Innovative Labor

How firms and academic researchers respond differently to changes in demand for pharmaceutical research.

Working paper

What to Buy When Forum Shopping?

Evidence on how plaintiffs select courts in German patent litigation.

Working paper

Selected publications

All publications

Filling the Gap: The Consequences of Collaborator Loss in Corporate R&D

How organizations respond when inventors lose internal or external collaborators.

Management Science, 2026

The Returns to Physical Capital in Knowledge Production

What laboratory disasters reveal about specialized equipment and scientific productivity.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2026

Patents, Freedom to Operate, and Follow-on Innovation

How patent invalidation changes subsequent innovation.

Management Science, 2025

Research data

Documentation and access

Patent–standard similarity

Semantic similarity measures for more than 200 million patent–standard pairs from ETSI, IEEE, and ITU-T.

Dataset Data description

Inventor biographies

Employment histories and inventive activity for more than 150,000 inventors in Germany from 1980 to 2014.

Dataset and access Data report

About

Biography and CV

Alongside academic research, I work with firms, public institutions, and other organizations on empirical questions involving innovation, intellectual property, and technology.

My research is funded by a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship, a research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and a Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation.

Based in
Barcelona, Spain