What are the effects of the WTO's TRIPS Agreement on growth, welfare and income inequality? To analyze this question, we develop an open-economy R&D-driven endogenous-growth model with wealth heterogeneity. Under TRIPS, the North experiences higher growth and welfare at the expense of higher...

Is the European nation-state system more favorable to economic growth than the united-empire system in ancient China? This paper develops an endogenous-growth model to analyze the conditions under which economic growth is higher under political fragmentation than political unification. Under...

This paper provides a politico-economic analysis of the European Union’s (EU) R&D policy. It develops an open-economy R&D-growth model characterized by two parameters that capture respectively the degree of technology spillover and the effectiveness of lobbying. In a non-cooperative...

In a generalized quality-ladder growth model, this paper firstly derives the optimal patent breadth and the socially optimal profit-sharing arrangement between patentholders. In this general-equilibrium setting, it identifies and derives a dynamic distortion of markup pricing on capital...

Is the patent length an effective policy instrument in stimulating R&D? This paper develops a generalized variety-expanding growth model and then calibrates the model to the aggregate data of the US economy to analyze the effects of extending the patent length. The numerical exercise suggests...

What are the effects of strengthening patent protection on income and consumption inequality? To analyze this question, this paper incorporates heterogeneity in the initial wealth of households into a canonical quality-ladder growth model with endogenous labor supply. In this model, I firstly...

What are the effects of increasing developing countries’ intellectual property rights protection on growth, welfare and income inequality in the global economy? To analyze this question, we develop a two-country R&D-growth model with wealth heterogeneity. We find that the North experiences...

This paper develops an endogenous growth model featuring environmental externalities, abatement R&D, and market imperfections. We compare the economic performances under three distinct regimes that encompass public abatement, private abatement without tax recycling, and private abatement with...

This paper develops an endogenous growth model featuring tax havens, and uses it to examine how the existence of tax havens affects the economic growth rate and social welfare in high-tax countries. We show that the presence of tax havens generates two conflicting channels in determining the...