This paper analyzes the importance of legal property documents in providing tenure security, enhancing agricultural investment incentives and easing access to credit. While theory predicts that better property rights on land can increase investment through increased security, enhanced trade...

There is well-known debate about the respective role of geography versus institutions in explaining the long term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity...

The literature on the licensing of an innovation has mainly focused on some speci c contract types. We show within the framework of a fairly general model that removing these contractual limitations will lead to extreme market outcomes. Speci cally, we nd that when the patentee can employ...

This paper analyzes the consequences of radical patent-regime change by exploiting a natural experiment: the forced adoption of the Prussian patent system in territories annexed after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Compared to other German states, Prussia granted patents more restrictively by...

Innovation is the key term of development in the modern world. Although it is of the utmost importance, there is still a lot to be done to popularize the idea of innovation, to ensure a common approach to the necessity of providing incentives, and of tightening the relevant legislation ensuring...

Recent empirical studies find vast industry differences in how patent protection influences innovation and growth. An optimization of aggregate growth, therefore, implies the need for a flexible patent regime responding to each industry's characteristics. In practice, sector-specific...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we study the patent hold-up problem in game-theoretic framework. We show that in subgame perfect equilibrium of the patent hold-up game the innovating manufacturer exerts reduced effort to develop the new product and the patent holder obtains the...

The objective of this paper is to show the necessity of reviving the debate on the economic justifications for patent protection. On the one hand, we see the need for the assessment of the overall welfare consequences of the existing systems of patent protection, and on the other hand, we...

This paper develops a three-stage model of innovation, fixed-fee licensing and production to evaluate the welfare effects of compulsory licensing, taking into account both static (information sharing) and dynamic (innovation incentive) effects. Compulsory licensing is shown to have an...

This article analyzes the effects of intellectual property rights protection on innovation in a quality-ladder model in which part of the consumers value being the exclusive consumers of the newest generation of a good. In the case of a monopoly innovator, we show that reducing IP protection can...