Two court decisions in the 1990s are widely viewed as having opened the door to a flood of business method and financial patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and to have also impacted other patent offices around the world. A number of scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued...

Several studies have highlighted ICT as a driver of firm productivity in developed countries. However, the evidence about the impacts of ICT on services and manufacturing and particularly for developing countries is scarce. This paper focuses on understanding the determinants of investments in...

This paper revisits the competition-innovation relationship using an unbalanced panel of enterprise data stemming from four waves of the Luxembourgish innovation survey for the period 2002-2010. We estimate by full-information maximum likelihood a nonlinear dynamic simultaneous-equations model...

Catching-up, leapfrogging and falling behind in terms of output and productivity in high-tech industries crucially depends on firms ability to keep pace with technological change. In fast changing industries todays specialization does not guarantee tomorrows success as changes in the...

Little investigation has been made to explain why women are less likely than are men to support democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa. This gender difference in politics has been found in numerous studies and may hinder the much needed legitimation of democracy in this region. This paper addresses the...

Information about the success of a new technology is usually held asymmetrically between the research and development RD-performing firm and potential lenders and investors. This raises the cost of capital for financing RD externally, resulting in financing constraints on RD especially for firms...

Innovation support measures in the EU are mostly designed to support product innovation in RD intensive sectors. To increase the still considerable contribution to regional employment and competitiveness from SMEs in traditional manufacturing industries a broader innovation policy mix is more...

A substantial literature has examined the determinants of support for democracy and although existing work has found a gender gap in democratic attitudes, there have been no attempts to explain it. In this paper we try to understand why females are less supportive of democracy than males in a...

What really makes an economy competitive? This paper reviews and discusses how the capacity to generate, exploit and diffuse new knowledge is key in enabling countries to capitalise on challenges brought about by rapid technology-driven transformations rather than succumb to their adverse...

Innovation serves many purposes. In this paper we study new varieties of innovation and innovation policy which address societal challenges in the largest cities in Europe. These metropolitan areas consistently show resounding characteristics in terms of multiplicities of innovation, governance...