Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

The role of intellectual property (IP) as an important value determinant is widely recognized. This article tries to quantify the role of IP in companies valuation by comparing a sample of biotechnology companies (46 companies included in the Genetic Engineering News Index:GEN-Dex) to the...

Intellectual Property Intensity (IPI) measures the weight of IP in the firm’s total market value. IPI has a positive (convex) functional relationship with Price to Book (P/B) ratio, and thus may provide additional economic insight to the empirical value-growth effect. Growth firms have higher...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

This paper offers a theoretical treatment of information disclosure through patenting. We consider a signaling model in which two domestic firms disclose their competencies to a foreign firm. Conditions are discussed under which separating and pooling equilibria occur, together with a...

The existing literature on the sources and nature of productivity growth during the early industrialization stages of U.S. has identified the combination of intellectual property rights (IPRs) with a large middle class and broad participation in markets as explanations for the extraordinary...

The growth effects of intellectual property right (IPR) protection are examined in a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth. Stronger IPR protection, which reduces the probability of imitation, raises the reward for innovation. However, stronger protection reduces the number of competitive...

The economics of information goods suggest the need for institutional intervention to address the problem of revenue extraction from investments in resources characterized by high fixed costs of production and low marginal costs of reproduction and distribution. Solutions to the appropriation...

This paper examines whether patenting increases the private incentives to innovate in manufacturing. To study this issue, we build a model in which the value of an innovation depends both on the type of innovation implemented (product, process) and on the existence of a patent protection or not....