To foster innovation and growth should basic research be publicly or privately funded? This paper studies the impact of the gradual shift in the U.S. patent system towards the patentability and commercialization of the basic R&D undertaken by universities. We see this movement as making...

Starting in the early 1980s, the U.S. patent regime experienced major changes that allowed the patenting of numerous scientific findings lacking in current commercial applications. We assess the rationality of these changes in the legal and institutional environment for science and technology...

By allowing for investment activities by research and development (R&D) firms to prevent product obsolescence, we show that if legal patent protection is too strong, a higher R&D subsidy rate delivers insufficient investments for survival in the R&D sector, depressing innovation and growth in...

The paper examines the relationship between competition and economic growth, in the theoretical framework described by endogenous growth models, but with a specific interest in the policy implications. In this perspective, the key issue in the debate can be presented as follows: do competition...

What are the effects of strengthening patent protection on income and consumption inequality? To analyze this question, this paper incorporates heterogeneity in the initial wealth of households into a canonical quality-ladder growth model with endogenous labor supply. In this model, I firstly...

Can a transfer of wealth from the US to least developed countries be Pareto improving? We analyze this question in an open-economy innovation-driven growth model, in which the high-income (low-income) country produces innovative (homogenous) goods. We find that wealth redistribution to the...

This paper examines quantitatively the effects of R&D subsidy and government-financed basic research on U.S. economic growth and consumer welfare. To achieve this, we develop an endogenous growth model which takes into account both public and private research investment, and the differences...

This paper investigates the rates of technological progress, total output growth, and per capita output growth when population growth is negative by using a semi-endogenous R&D growth model. The analysis shows that within finite time, the employment share of the final goods sector reaches unity,...

This paper shows that the results of Bianco (2006) depend critically on the assumption that there are no difference between the intermediate goods share in final output, the returns of specialization and the degree of market power of monopolistic competitors. In this paper, we disentangle the...

In this paper, we extend the Romer90 model by introducing an embodied technological change and by removing the scale effects. We show that this model can still generate steady state growth in which the embodied technical change has an positive and permanent effect on growth in the long-run.