One of the main objectives of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to facilitate world’s trade and production. It enforces legally binding multilateral agreements on trade in goods, services and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. The Trade Related Intellectual...

Such institutions as patent systems cannot be well understood without an assessment of technological creativity in other contexts. Some have argued that prizes might offer superior alternatives to the award of property rights in inventions. Accordingly, this paper offers an empirical comparison...

La pianificazione urbanistica genera differenze tra i proprietari delle aree. Queste differenze sono state attenuate, ma non del tutto eliminate dall’evoluzione dell’ordinamento giuridico italiano. La legge regionale della Lombardia n. 12 del 2005 prevede diritti edificatori trasferibili a...

L’articolo discute la questione dei diritti di edificazione considerando tre domande. Anzitutto, qual’è la relazione tra diritti di edificazione e proprietà dei suoli (il diritto di edificazione è qualcosa che viene concesso dal governo locale, oppure il governo locale si limita a...

The implementation of a copyright protection reform in Sweden in April 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and punished for illegal file sharing. This paper investigates the impact of the reform on illegal file sharing and music sales using a difference-in-differences approach with...

Using threshold estimation techniques, this study examines whether the growth effect of stock market development differs according to the different levels of property rights and minority shareholders protection in a cross-section of 85 jurisdictions during the post-crisis period. The results...

Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at...

I provide a justification of intellectual property rights as a source of static efficiency gains in manufacturing, rather than dynamic benefits from greater innovation. I develop a property-rights model of a supply relationship with two dimensions of non- contractible investment. In equilibrium,...

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the tradeoffs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now, in most industries and for most potential users,...