During the past several years, the United States has concluded a substantial number of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (hereinafter “FTAs”), largely with developing countries. Each of those FTAs includes substantial commitments in the field of intellectual property rights (IPRs)...

This paper examines a number of government policies related to competition or intellectual property and affecting innovation for their welfare effects. Its premise is that the enhancement of social welfare is included among the purposes of competition and intellectual-property laws. It also...

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...

The TRIPs plus phenomenon (additional steps to strengthen the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) tends to be attributed to the regional and bilateral efforts of the United States. This paper suggests that such a perception is mistaken. The EU certainly seeks to...

The U.S. has been under pressure to abandon the unique first-to-invent feature of its patent law for awarding patents. The opposition to reform however argues that switch to a first-to-file rule, the international norm, will undermine innovation. We evaluate this argument in a dynamic stochastic...

We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...