The world is banking on a major increase in food production, if the dietary needs and food preferences of an increasing, and increasingly rich, population are to be met. This requires the further expansion of modern agriculture, but modern agriculture rests on a small number of highly productive...

Why do some countries industrialize much earlier than others? One widely-accepted answer is that markets need to be large enough for producers to find it profitable to bear the fixed cost of introducing modern technologies. This insight, however, has limited explanatory power, as illustrated by...

This research explores the effects of distance to the pre-industrial technological frontiers on comparative economic development in the course of human history. It establishes theoretically and empirically that distance to the frontier had a persistent non-monotonic effect on a country's...

This paper discusses alternative incentive mechanisms for encouraging pharmaceutical innovations that support global health policy priorities. Patent buyouts, in which a public fund pays a mark-up on private valuations from sealed-bid second-price auctions, would boost the efficiency of research...

Of the diverse factors motivating technological change, one factor that has received increasing attention in the recent past has been the protection of intellectual property rights. Given fairly recent changes in the international policy ethos where a regime of stronger intellectual property...

Of the diverse factors motivating technological change, one factor that has received increasing attention in the recent past has been the protection of intellectual property rights. Given fairly recent changes in the international policy ethos where a regime of stronger intellectual property...

This paper revises and updates the Campi-Nuvolari index of intellectual property protection for plant varieties (Campi and Nuvolari, 2015). The new index has been updated and provides yearly scores for the period 1961-2018 for a total number of 104 countries, which have legislation on plant...

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic innovation based on a data set covering the pharmaceutical industries across 29 provinces in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the period 1998-2007. We show that there is a negative horizontal spillover effect...

This paper discusses alternative incentive mechanisms for encouraging pharmaceutical innovations that support global health policy priorities. Patent buyouts, in which a public fund pays a mark-up on private valuations from sealed-bid second-price auctions, would boost the efficiency of research...