Firms and governments spend billions of dollars on R&D every year. To increase social welfare, the results of R&D must be commercialized so that consumers can benefit from improved products and lower prices. One measure of R&D output is patents; however, most patent databases contain no...

We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size and in their capacities for innovation. We associate the strength of IPR protection with the...

In 2004 the German Patent and Trademark Office commissioned the Ifo Institute to deliver a research report on the topic "Identification of Available and Desirable Indicators for Patent Systems, Patenting Processes and Patent Rights". - The report provides an extensive overview of the existing...

Professor Colleen Chien recently developed an innovative and important model that relies on a patent's "after-acquired" characteristics to predict the chances that the patent will be involved in litigation. This comment critiques Professor Chien's model by identifying certain weaknesses,...

Professional mobility has profound importance for firm strategy, innovation, and productivity. Prior work on legal constraints on mobility has focused on non-compete covenants and patents. Here, we investigate the impact of the doctrine of inevitable disclosure in U.S. state-level trade secrets...

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 (‘BPCIA’) to create an abbreviated approval pathway for generic ‘biological products’ that are demonstrated to be highly similar (i.e., biosimilar) to or interchangeable with an...

The law often limits the liability of an intermediary for the speech it carries. And rightly so, because imposing liability on intermediaries can induce them to filter out questionable content and this “collateral censorship” risks suppressing much lawful, even highly beneficial, speech. The...

Concerns have been expressed over the role of WIPO in influencing the intellectual property policies of other specialized agencies of the United Nations. This article reviews the policies of FAO, WHO and UNESCO, in addition to WIPO itself, and finds very interesting patterns of cooperation....