Encouraging inventors to disclose new inventions is an important economic justification for the patent system, yet the technical information contained in patent applications is often inadequate and unclear. This paper proposes a novel approach to measure disclosure in patent applications using...

This paper investigates firm dynamics in the period before, during, and after an event consisting of a first published patent application. The analysis is based on patent data from the Norwegian Industrial Property Office merged with data from several business registers covering a period of...

An effective policy scheme to overcome the suboptimal low provision levels of global public goods is developed in this paper. By suggesting a decentralized approach to raise environmental public good provision levels we take account of the lack of a coercive global authority that is able to...

The paper reviews recent literature on the economics of migration and diasporas, focusing on economic gains and opportunities that these diasporas could represent for home countries. In addition, the paper discusses policies aimed at leveraging this "diaspora capital"

The importance of the prehistoric migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa for comparative economic development has been the focus of a vibrant research agenda in the past decade. This influential literature has attracted the attention of some scholars from other disciplines, and in...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

Tourism accounts for around one tenth of global GDP. We analyze the impact of entertainment media in drawing tourists to filming locations (media multiplier ) and, in turn, the effect of tourism on local economic development (tourism multiplier ). To assess the media multiplier, we employ a...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer...