O'donoghue and Zweimüller (2004, J. of Econ. Growth), a seminal work, showed that broadening leading breadth in patent … protection can stimulate innovation. However, the empirical literature has consistently found skeptical results on the positive … our model, broadening leading breadth can negatively affect innovation because each innovator is incentivized to free …

may even reduce welfare. The reason is that it crowds out proprietary innovation which on net may reduce total innovation … in the long run. These effects would be reinforced if philanthropical innovation diverted people from other productive …

the way economists theorize about and analyze a number of topics central to the discipline. One is the theory of the firm … in industries where technological and organizational innovation is important. Indeed a large literature has grown up on … ways they evolve over time. Another domain concerns the nature of competition in such industries, wherein innovation and …

product (or "downstream") sector. Innovation takes place in both sectors. Following Gilbert and Shapiro (1990), we define … patent breadth as the ability of the innovator to reap profits as a result of the patent protection. Greater patent breadth … in the downstream sector increases the incentives of agents to do R&D in that sector but discourages innovation in the …

patent lifetime a government would set in order to maximise economic growth. We show that a finite patent lifetime does exist … of research technology on this optimal patent lifetime …

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model to analyze the interaction between patent policy and firms’ internal strategies … to capture value from innovations. We consider two dimensions of patent policy: backward protection against imitation and … forward protection, also known as blocking patents, against subsequent innovation that builds on a patented technology …