Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly excludable. The paper introduces a new taxonomy of...

This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protect firms from imitation and are considered crucial to promote innovation and technological diffusion. This paper examines the impact of IPR on import sourcing decisions of multinationals. We consider a framework in which firms offshore production of an...

This paper studies how the Intellectual Property Right (IPR) regime in destination countries influences the way multinationals structure the international organization of their production. In particular, we explore how multinationals divide tasks of different complexities across countries with...

This paper studies the incentives that developing countries have to protect intellectual properties rights (IPR). On the one hand, free-riding on rich countries technology reduces their investment cost in R&D. On the other hand, firm that violates IPR cannot legally export in a country that...

This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of imitation by a competitor. We suppose that the innovation can be continuously fragmented into sub-innovations. We characterize the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the...

On May 30, 2017, the Supreme Court held that the initial authorized sale of a patented item within or outside the U.S. "exhausts" all rights of the patentee to that item under the Patent Act. This decision goes against the Government's position that a foreign sale authorized by the U.S. patentee...

We study how trademarks affect reuse of creative works in the comics industry. As a creative industry, the comics industry systematically relies on copyrights. But trademark protection can also be exploited to generate income from the reuse of comic characters or to strategically exclude others...

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 and in their capacities for innovation. We associate the strength of IPR protection with the...

We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...