A patent is the legal right of an inventor to exclude others from making or using a particular invention. This right is sometimes termed an lsquo;intellectual property right' and is viewed as an incentive for innovation. This article surveys the evidence on patent effectiveness in encouraging...

Italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms' productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor...