Recent scholarship highlights the importance of institutions to the processes of economic growth, but the precise nature of their relationship bears further examination. This paper considers how the evolution of legal institutions has contributed to, and in turn been affected by, major...

The paper explores the role of institutional mechanisms in generating technological knowledge spillovers. The estimation is over panel datasets of patent grants, and unpatented innovations that were submitted for prizes at the annual industrial fairs of the American Institute of New York, during...

Such institutions as patent systems cannot be well understood without an assessment of technological creativity in other contexts. Some have argued that prizes might offer superior alternatives to the award of property rights in inventions. Accordingly, this paper offers an empirical comparison...