We study the relation between patent concentration and tax-motivated income shifting. Using affiliate-level data for European multinational corporations (MNCs) and employing the relative share of patents held by an MNC as a measure for patent concentration, we predict and find that tax-motivated...

U.S. intellectual property law is firmly rooted in utilitarian principles. Copyright law is viewed as a means to give proper monetary incentives to authors for their creative effort. Many European copyright systems pursue additional goals: Authors have the right to be named as author, to control...

This paper examines the evolution of national competition (antitrust) policies and enforcement approaches vis-à-vis intellectual property rights (IPRs) and associated anti-competitive practices in major jurisdictions over the past several decades. It focuses especially on the underlying process...

The appropriability of innovation depends not only on the instruments available to an innovator to protect private returns, but how those instruments interact with each other as part of the firm's entrepreneurial strategy. We consider the interplay between two appropriability mechanisms...

Inter-country equity in the taxation of IP is a contentious issue. With its BEPS initiative, the OECD aims at taxing in accordance with value creation even though there are admitted difficulties in determining the actual place of value creation. The European Commission promotes the introduction...

We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

Digital designs - that is, designs for display on electronic screens - have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright-, trademark- and patent-eligible subject...

This work investigates the relationship between proxies of innovation activities, such as patents and trademarks, and firm performance in terms of revenues, growth and profitability. By resorting to the virtual universe of Italian manufacturing firms this work provides a rather complete picture...

Competition agency guidelines, policy statements and related advocacy are an important vehicle for policy expression and the guidance of firms across the full spectrum of anti-competitive practices and market conduct. The role of guidelines and policy statements has, arguably, been particularly...

I quantify the effects of private-network music sharing on aggregate album sales in the BitTorrent era using a panel of US sales and private-network downloads for 2,109 albums during 2008. Exogenous shocks to the network's sharing constraints address the simultaneity problem. In theory,...