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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

An established result of the endogenous growth literature is that laissez-faire equilibria in expanding-varieties models are suboptimal due to the rent-effect: monopolistic pricing drives the equilibrium quantity of each intermediate input below the efficient level, implying that it is optimal...

A previous result by Kemnitz (2001) based on AK type endogenous growth model implied that the gains from immigration depends up on the percapita possession of capital stock by immigrant relative to that of the natives’. However, such a framework ignores the incentive labor creates for...

In this paper we argue that government procurement policy played a role in stimulating the wave of innovation that hit the US economy in the 1980's, as well as the simultaneous increase in inequality and in education attainment. Since the early 1980's U.S. policy makers began targeting...

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...