To stay on top of global competition, firms and governments often need to acquire innovative goods and services, including ideas and research, from their strategic suppliers. A careful design of procurement policy is crucial to make potential suppliers generate and sell the most suitable...

Researchers aiming to invent and develop innovative products and processes need to be continuously updated about at least a minimum fraction of the last relevant innovations. If the flow of new ideas is too intense researchers spend most of their time reading and hearing. This never lasting...

Despite the huge economic value of the innovations, in European countries the yet unpatented results of the R&D activity can be stolen with little risk of criminal sanctions. By considering the anti-industrial espionage legislation in Europe, it turns out that no country has a law comparable to...

This paper introduces the monographic issue of Rivista di Politica Economica on “Intellectual Property, Competition, and Growth”. It presents the twelve contributions selected after a Callfor-Papers. The contributions deal with different facets of the protection of intellectual property...

The process aimed at discovering new ideas is an economic activity whose returns are intrinsically uncertain. In a standard neo-Schumpeterian growth framework we assume that, when deciding upon R&D efforts, economic agents hold ‘ambiguous beliefs’ about the exact probability of arrival of...

It is well known that research and development (R&D) is an important engine for economic growth. Also, initial wealth inequality and subsequent economic growth are well known to be related. This paper links inequality and R&D-driven growth. It shows that in a class of economies where R&D is the...

In this paper we study the geometrical properties of the support of the limit distributions of income/wealth in economies with uninsurable individual risk, and how they are affected by technology and preference parameters and by policy variables. We work out two simple successive generation...