Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8-10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

The literature suggests that tax rates on mobile activities should fall to zero. Intellectual property is very mobile and has grown in importance. Firms can use intellectual property to shift income offshore and reduce their corporate income tax liability. Yet most intellectual property is held...

This Paper develops a model for analysing the costs and benefits of intellectual property enforcement in LDCs. The North is more productive than the South and is the only source of innovator. There are two types of goods, and each bloc has a comparative advantage in producing a specific type of...

Using data on U.S. universities, we show that universities that give higher royalty shares to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university size, academic quality, research funding and other factors. We use pre-sample data on university patenting to control for...

Price controls create opportunities for international arbitrage. Many have argued that such arbitrage, if tolerated, will undermine intellectual property rights and dull the incentives for investment in research-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. We challenge this orthodox view and...

According to a common argument, the presence of strong intellectual property rights spurs innovation, which then leads to fiercer competition, higher economic growth and increasing benefits for the average consumers. We argue that, in the case of intellectual property rights, this has lead to...

Can the increasing significance of knowledge-products in national income---the growing weightless economy---influence economic development? Those technologies reduce ``distance'' between consumers and knowledge production. This paper analyzes a model embodying such a reduction. The model shows...

We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size, in their capacities for innovation and in their absolute and comparative advantage in...

This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services across patent offices. Quality is defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology consists of a two-layer analytical framework...

A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are...