It may be advantageous to provide a variety of kinds of patent protection to heterogenous innovations. Innovations which benefit society largely through their use as building blocks to future inventions may require a different scope of protection in order to be encouraged. We model the problem...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that a firm's R&D and the R&D of other firms increase conventional factor productivity. We investigate these phenomena further by examining the relationship between plant-level productivity and firm-level R&D. We find that (1) the productivity-enhancing...

This paper examines the evidence on technology diffusion through trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly research and development (R&D) investments, employing imported intermediates implies an implicit sharing of the technology that was...

In this paper we analyze the evidence from a large number of studies on three specific questions pertaining to R&D investment: (1) Are there diminishing returns to inventive activities? (2) What is the relationship between R&D and productivity and what are the magnitudes of the returns to a...

This paper uses wavelets to decompose each stock's trading-volume variance into frequency-specific components. We find that stocks dominated by short-run fluctuations in trading volume have abnormal returns that are 1% per month higher than otherwise similar stocks where short-run fluctuations...

The pace of industrial innovation and growth is shaped by many forces that interact in complicated ways. Profit-maximizing firms pursue new ideas to obtain market power, but the pursuit of the same goal by other means that even successful inventions art eventually superseded by others; this...

This paper examines the consequences of the differences in the timing of information disclosure between the U.S. and Japanese patent systems. Under the Japanese system it is possible for a firm to apply for a patent knowing the exact specifications of a rival's patent application. In contrast,...

This paper estimates the effects of intranational and international R&D spillovers on the cost and production structure for ten Canadian and Japanese manufacturing industries. Domestic spillovers generate greater effects on average variable cost and factor intensities compared to international...

This paper explores the characteristics of 238 patents on 94 "inventions" contributed by major multinational innovators to the "Eco-Patent Commons", which provides royalty-free access to third parties to patented climate change related innovations. By comparing the pledged patents to other...