Patents for inventions are at the crossroad of law, technology and economics, with the Patent System resting on two fundamental assumptions: one, that technical progress is desirable and that disclosure is preferable to secrecy; two, that a competitive market economy is in the public interest,...

This paper estimates the process of diffusion and decay of knowledge from university, public laboratories and corporate patents in six countries and tests the differences across countries and across technological fields using data from the European Patent Office. It finds that university and...

This paper studies the nature, sources and determinants of international patenting activity in Latin American countries (LACs) and examines the extent to which LACs benefit from R&D that is performed in the G-5 countries (France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States). By using...

Several scholars have tried to focus on growth accounting of specific examples of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). But, what are the factors that might make a General Purpose Technology succeed or fail once the invention has been "triggered"? This paper is a preliminary answer to this...

We review the micro-level evidence on the effects of trade and investment liberalization in the developing world. The main findings can be summarized as follows. 1) There is evidence of trade-induced productivity gains; 2) These gains mainly stem from the intra-industry real-location of...

We analyzed the scientific productivity of a sample of academic scientists that contribute to the field of Materials Science in the post-patenting period, by means of several econometric techniques suitable to treat unobserved heterogeneity, excess zeros and incidental truncation. Although...

A high share of foreign currency denomination of domestic public debt in rules out any recourse to inflation tax as an effective adjustment device. Anti- inflation policies based upon hard peg regimes may remove the exchange rate risk in the short run but - as pointed out by Argentina’s...

Negli ultimi vent'anni, l'apertura commerciale delle economie dell'Asia orientale – con abbondanza relativa di lavoro - ha eroso il vantaggio comparato dei paesi a reddito medio-alto nei manufatti ad alta intensità di lavoro. Questo fenomeno ha colpito particolarmente l’Italia, notoriamente...

The rate of technical change that is characterising both the telecommunications and the computer industry has been a major driver of the evolution of a close and stable system into an open and dynamic one. The introduction of a cluster of new technologies has originated significant changes...

This paper focuses on niche entry patterns in the LAN equipment industry in the 1990s. We analyze an original data-set of LAN equipment consisting of more than 1,000 hubs and switches marketed between 1990 and 1999. Modularity emerged as a design strategy that supported incumbent firms’...