Anderson

A couple of years or so ago, I wrote a post on philanthropy and its impact on the creation of intellectual property.  This appears to be an under-researched area and deserves some additional review.  The Bayh-Dole Act (and general U.S. federal policy) operates to redistribute wealth from tax payers to universities, non-profits and companies through their ability to take title to government funded inventions.  Essentially, tax payers pay money to the government.  Instead of that money getting redistributed through social programs or other means, the money is distributed in the form of grants for research to universities, non-profits and companies.  The Bayh-Dole Act then allows those entities to take title to any inventions developed from that money.  Part of the rationale for the Bayh-Dole Act, along with the incentive to commercialize theory, is to ensure that private industry has the incentive to bring government funded technology to market--to cross the...

M&A activity in the pharma space has focused on seeking mega-mergers structured as a tax inversion, where the surviving company is domiciled in the lower tax rate jurisdiction. This structure has come under vociferous criticism, especially in the U.S., where the claim has been made that U.S. companies are seeking to flee the US solely for achieve tax benefits. The poster child for this kind of transaction was the proposed $160 billion deal between Pfizer and Allergan, which called for Pfizer to relocate to Ireland and to reap tax benefits of $1 billion a year. The deal was scrapped in early April, after new tax regulations made the transaction less unattractive. But if mega-deals with a sizeable tax consequence, such as the proposed Pfizer and Allergan merger, are now less likely to occur, this does not mean that pharma transaction activity will come to end. An illustrative example of what such future deals may look like can be found in the announcement at the end of June that...