Study on the desirability of EC level legislation in the area of software patents. It is based on a comparative analysis of the present state of the law, and the advantages and disadvantages appearing from current practice in the EC Member States, the United States and Japan. While its principal...

This study has been carried out at the request of the EGE for the preparation of Opinion n°16 "Ethical aspects of patenting inventions involving human stem cell" , 12 January 2002

This is a report on aspects of the interface between competition law and patent law. Competition authorities have long been aware of the potentially difficult relationship between these two bodies of Law. At the level of the EU, this relationship has already been abundantly discussed in both the...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, for West Germany, France, Italy and US, we econometrically select within a SVAR model some fiscal policy regimes, i.e. a u0094set of rulesu0094 for the implementation of fiscal policies. Second, we identify the fiscal policy shocks related to different...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...