Patent trolls appropriate profits from innovation solely by enforcing patents against infringers.They are often characterized as relying on low-quality patents, an assessment that, if correct,would imply that eradicating such patents would effectively terminate the troll business. Inthis paper,...

The situation of technologies searching for market opportunities is a common one in technology-based industries. We add to the technology manager‘s toolbox by developing a new tool for application identification. It is based on insights from user innovation and lead user research, with merits...

Network externalities spur the growth of networks and the adoption of network goods intwo ways. First, they make it attractive to join a network with a large installed base.Second, they make it attractive for network members to actively recruit new members.Despite indications that this “peer...

Firms in Kenya rely on technologies such as computers, cell-phones, and generators toovercome constraints associated with regulations, infrastructure, security, workforce,corruption, and finance. This study shows that such reliance has significant positive impactson productivity as measured by...

In this paper, we explore empirically the role of openness, technology and labour marketrigidity in the determination of the effect of the exchange rate on employment in Portugal. Wedevelop an index that allows us to measure labour market flexibility at the sector level. Thisindex shows that...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, thereis hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ thoseworkers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory ofskill-biased change in...

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as afunction of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affecttechnical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely externalnon-economic) as well as other...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities onfirms’ performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontiertechnique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal datasetconsisting of 532 top...

We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by thecurrent and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. Theequivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking pricesparametrically. This result justifies TFP...