Intellectual property law, which includes patents and copyright law, establishes the ownership of innovations by people. It conveys a bundle of rights to creators as determined by rules. Applied to intellectual property law, the normative question of growth economics is, “Which ownership rules...

This is the scientific report from a research programme which explored the current lack of a suitable public system for protecting GIs in Southern Africa. In contrast to the European Union, the current South African legal framework only provides for the protection of GIs as collective and, in...

This paper analyzes the setting of national patent policies in the global economy. In the standard model with free trade and social-welfare-maximizing governments à la Grossman and Lai (2004), cross-border positive policy externalities induce individual countries to select patent strengths that...

A vertically integrated firm, having acquired the intellectual property (IP) through innovation to become an input monopolist, can extract surplus by supplying efficient downstream competitors. That the monopolist would refuse to do so is puzzling and has led to numerous debates in antitrust. In...

Intellectual property rights have been driven relentlessly towards a unitary system for the entire world, originally through passive copying of flawed United States arrangements, but more recently as a result of determined lobbying by American interests. But diversity and competition have the...

This paper examines an economic theory of when employees become entrepreneurs. It jointly addresses the two fundamental questions of when employees generate innovations, and whether these innovations are developed as internal ventures or outside the firm. The model shows that if generating...

Why do firms use continuations in the prosecution of their patents? Motivated by the widespread use of continuations by U.S. firms and the prominence of this procedure in U.S. patent policy debates, we investigate the influence of corporate and patent characteristics on the use of continuations....

This study develops a Schumpeterian growth model to analyze the effects of different patent instruments on innovation. We first analyze patent breadth that captures the traditional positive effect of patent rights on innovation. Then, we consider a profit-division rule between entrants and...

Intra-Asian foreign direct investment (FDI) is dominated by flows from high technology economies to medium technology economies, while FDI elsewhere primarily consists of flows among high technology economies. This distinctive pattern is not due simply to differences in the relative distribution...