Patents are the result of risky and costly R&D and the developer will try to recover its costs (and earn a return) through the sale of products covered by the patent, licensing others to use the invention (often a product or process), or through the outright sale of the patent.Patents are...

At least since Arrow (1962), economists have believed that strong property rights are necessary for firms to invest in innovation. This belief was a key principle underlying the Bayh-Dole Act, which gave universities the right to own and license federally funded inventions, because the...

Designing around patents is prevalent but not often appreciated as a means by which patents promote economic development through competition. We provide a novel detailed empirical study of the extent and timing of designing around patent claims. We study the filing rate of incandescent...

Within the context of an endogenous growth model with nonhomothetic preferences and income distribution, this paper analyzes whether there might be disagreement between rich and poor consumers about the optimal patent policy. In equilibrium, the poor and the rich differ with respect to the share...

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,...

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model with private IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) enforcement and investigate the implications for IPR and R&D policies. In our setting, successful innovators undertake costly activities to enforce their patents and protect their monopoly rents. These Rent...

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the...

Universities have recently been facing pressure to increase the share of commercialized R&D results, as well as to manage their intellectual property rights responsibly, including the remuneration of employee-inventors. The paper brings the first overall evidence of monetary incentives and...

A quota system with an associated deadline may retain the possibility of worker procrastination and related deadline behaviors. A performance appraisal system based on continuous temporal incentives, on the other hand, has the potential to alleviate deadline effects but may lose some of the...