Our objective in this paper is to review what economists have said about incentive schemes to promote R&D, including intellectual property. While we focus on environments in which other forms of protection are not available, we note that other protections can obviate the need for any formal...

Economic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution- intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the “pollution haven” hypothesis, is...

Intellectual property treaties have two main types of provisions: national treatment of foreign inventors, and harmonization of protections. I characterize the circumstances in which countries would want to treat foreign inventors the same as national inventors. I then argue that national...

The trickle of business method patents issued by the United States Patent Office became a flood after the State Street Bank decision in 1998. Many scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decision itself. This paper discusses the likely impact...

This paper analyzes patterns of foreign direct investment in India. We investigate how labor conflict, credit constraints, and indicators of a state’s economic health influence location decisions of foreign firms. We account for the possible endogeneity of labor conflict variables in modeling...

There are a number of ethical issues in the area of international trade that affect managers. This article will address two ethical issues that have been almost totally neglected in the literature -- antidumping and sanctions. Antidumping laws are special interest legislation. Rather than...

The paper examines the reasons that induced Italian Parliament not to approve an antitrust law at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, while in the United States, the first national antitrust provision, the Sherman Act, was adopted in 1890. Was the American...

The LoopCo Plan, which uses market mechanisms to promote competition, is the best approach to restructuring the telecommunications market, say its proponents, who object to the requirements and to-date implementation of the Telecommunications Act of l996. The local-loop's spin-off 's consumer...