We analyze how contractibility affects contract design. A major concern when designing research agreements is that researchers use their funding to subsidize other projects. We show that, when research activities are not contractible, an option contract is optimal. The financing firm obtains the...

Multinational enterprises' research and development (R&D) activities are increasingly internationalised and organised into new types of network, as part of their global innovation networks. In this article, we investigate the dynamics and strategies of R&D reorganisation through an in-depth case...

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish ?migr?s from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the ?migr?s' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of ?migr?s with fields of other German chemists. Patenting...

Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile, other "defacto" IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has become more important because of the increasing closeness of...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

Even though management consultants increasingly recommend that in-house research be outsourced, little is known about the conditions favoring substitution or complementarity between internal R&D and external technology acquisition. In this paper, we attempt to provide a deeper understanding of...

We analyse research collaboration in the Italian biotechnological sector using bibliometric data. We build a database of all scientific publications of Italian biotechnology firms over the period 1990 to may 2006 and we provide evidence on the institutional and geographical nature of research...

In the presence of markup differences, externalities and other social considerations, the equilibrium direction of innovation can be systematically distorted. This paper builds a simple model of endogenous technology, which generalizes existing comparative static results and characterizes...

This Handbook chapter surveys the extensive body of research on the economics of the pharmaceutical industry (with peripheral attention paid also to regulated medical devices). Pharmaceuticals is one of the world's most research-intensive industries, generating a continuing steam of new products...