Institutional Complementarities and Property Rights-Technology Equilibria under Knowledge Intensive Technology

The unprecedented development of intellectual property rights (both in scale and scope) has been one of the most important factors in the transformation of the world economy over the last three decades. We argue that, at least in part, economic importance of knowledge has brought an overreaching enclosure movement on it. IPRs regime protecting the knowledge base of firms deprives knowledge workers of owning the intellectual assets developed in the production process. This development, in turn, (a) has damaging consequences on the knowledge workers’ skills; thereby (b) the rise of a virtuous cycle between nonexclusive property rights and workers’ skills is prevented.