This Paper analyses the impact of R&D subsidies on incumbent firms to introduce new goods. We are especially interested in investigating various consequences of government subsidies for R&D, provided to firms that offer products of different qualities. This study examines the incentives of...

Innovative activities often are heavily regulated. Reviews conducted by administrative agencies take time and are not perfectly accurate. Of particular concern is whether, by design or not, such agencies discriminate against more important innovations by taking more time to perform their...

This Paper elaborates on the recent race to sequence the human genome. Starting from the debate arising from the genome case on public versus private research, the Paper shows that in some fundamental research areas, where knowledge externalities play an important role, market and non-market...

The economic slowdown in the 70s in Latin America and Japan in the late 90s, generated a growing skepticism about the role of industrial policy in the process of economic development. Yet, new considerations have emerged over the recent period, which invite us to revisit the issue. This paper...

This paper is the first of a larger project aimed at exploring, among other things, whether Europe has a consistent innovation policy in the context of EU economic law (competition policy, intellectual property law, sector regulation). As such, its primary aim is to present our approach for...

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...

We study the interplay between basic and applied research intensities in a simple model of creative destruction with research complementarities. Basic research intensity is chosen by the government and applied research intensity by the private sector. We find that the closer the country is to...

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the...

Prizes are often awarded to encourage research on products deemed of vital importance. We present a mechanism which can, in situations where the innovators are better informed about the difficulty of the research, tailor perfectly the expected reward to the expected research costs. The idea is...

We construct a model where the equilibrium organization of firms changes as an economy approaches the world technology frontier. In vertically integrated firms, owners (managers) have to spend time both on production and innovation activities, and this creates managerial overload, and...