The patent system gives the courts discretion to tailor patentability standards flexibly across technologies to provide optimal incentives for innovation. For chemical inventions, the courts deem them unpatentable if the chemical lacks a practical, non-research-based use at the time patent...

I develop a growth model in which R&D resources can be directed either to the discovery of new technologies (inventions) or to the improvement of the quality of machines without altering their underlying technology (innovations). Learning-by-doing is an important determinant of the relative...

Estimates of GDP are sensitive to whether a business expenditure is treated as an investment or an intermediate input. Shifting an expenditure category from intermediate expenditures to investment expenditures increases GDP. While the international guide to measurement (the SNA (93)) recognizes...

This paper empirically studies the roles of productivity and other factors such as globalization and financial constraints in shaping the innovation-related activities of Chinese firms between 2005 and 2007, in a context of quickly developing economy. Our empirical analysis based on firm-level...

This paper proposes a model of endogenous growth where innovating requires both researchers, who produce inventions, and entrepreneurs who implement them. As research and entrepreneurship compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and research effort is...

This paper provides an update of the paper 'From R&D to Productivity Growth: Do the Institutional Settings and the Source of Funds of R&D Matter?' (Guellec and van Pottelsberghe 2004). We present estimates of the long-term impact of various sources of knowledge (R&D performed by the business...

Employing cross-country data, this paper evaluates the transitional dynamics predictions of a non-scale growth model of endogenous technology innovation and imitation. We show that, unlike the neoclassical growth framework, the transitional dynamics of the R&D-based growth model can account for...

This paper presents estimates of the long-term impact of various sources of knowledge (R&D performed by the business sector, the public sector and foreign firms) on multifactor productivity growth of 16 countries from 1980 to 1998. The main results show that the three sources of knowledge are...

This paper studies whether foreign investment deregulation promotes firm innovation. A theoretical framework, in which the spillover and competition effects from more foreign firms induced by foreign investment deregulation, is built to guide the empirical evaluation. Exploiting the data on...

Incumbent firms have two basic possibilities to improve their competitive position in the product market: investment in R&D and the creation of entry barriers to the disadvantage of potential rivals, e.g. through lobbying activities, campaign contributions, bribes or the adoption of incompatible...