This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

In this paper I build a North-South model of international trade, economic growth and search-frictional unemployment in the North. Growth is driven by a process of creative destruction in the North followed by imitation in the South. I study the effects of intellectual property rights protection...

Institutions of higher education are considered as an important source of innovation. Consequently, big efforts are made to facilitate technology transfer from academia into the market. However, technology transfer at German universities does not seem to live up to its full potential. We find...

This paper tests a number of hypotheses on the use and effectiveness of patents and trade secrets designed to protect innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate the complementary role of the two protection...

We develop a dynamic duopoly model of R&D competition to improve the quality of a finalgood. The innovation process is sequential and cumulative, and takes place alongside productionin an infinite-horizon setting. In this context we study the R&D incentive impacts resultingfrom a “research...

This paper seeks to understand the intriguing but only sparsely explored phenomenon of “leisure timeinvention,” where the main underlying idea for the new product or process occurs when the inventor isaway from the workplace. We add to previous research by focussing on the inventive...

At which stage in the production chain should patent licensing takes place? In this paper we show that under realistic circumstances a patent holder would be better off by licensing downstream. This occurs when the licensing revenue can depend on the downstream value of the product either...

We test whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by estimating IV structural equations for a large sample of Swiss firms. We find that better appropriability conditions at the industry level raise the number of competitors. However, conditional on the given industry...

In the past several decades, the U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand potential common forces behind these empirical regularities through the lens of...

We study the causal impact of invalidating marginally valid patents during post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office on affected inventors' subsequent patenting. We exploit exogenous variation in invalidation by leveraging the participation of a patent's original examiner in the...