This Paper develops a model for analysing the costs and benefits of intellectual property enforcement in LDCs. The North is more productive than the South and is the only source of innovator. There are two types of goods, and each bloc has a comparative advantage in producing a specific type of...

Using data on U.S. universities, we show that universities that give higher royalty shares to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university size, academic quality, research funding and other factors. We use pre-sample data on university patenting to control for...

Price controls create opportunities for international arbitrage. Many have argued that such arbitrage, if tolerated, will undermine intellectual property rights and dull the incentives for investment in research-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. We challenge this orthodox view and...

We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size, in their capacities for innovation and in their absolute and comparative advantage in...

This paper develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services across patent offices. Quality is defined as the extent to which patent offices comply with their patentability conditions in a transparent way. The methodology consists of a two-layer analytical framework...

This paper examines patent protection in an endogenous-growth model. Our aim is two-fold. First, we show how the patent policies discussed by the recent patent-design literature can influence R&D in the endogenous-growth framework, where the role of patents has been largely ignored. Second, we...

This Paper discusses a number of issues in the context of the debate on intellectual property in less developed countries (LDCs). It starts by discussing the consequences of IP enforcement in LDCs for global innovation and welfare in poorer countries. It then considers the costs and benefits of...

The protection that innovators obtain through intellectual property rights crucially depends on their incentives and ability to litigate infringers. Taking patents as a notable example, we study how the financing of legal costs can alter the incentives to litigate in defence of a patent and,...

The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the quality level of their examination processes....

This paper presents a quality index for patent systems. The index is composed of nine operational design components that help shape the transparency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions. Seven factors are related to rules and regulations...