Firm success is often associated with the development of better products. Private firms undertake applied R&D seeking market advantage, by capitalizing on the freely accessible results of basic research. But unpatentable basic research often fails to address applied R&D open problems. What is...

What is the most innovation-enhancing level of patent protection for the new ideas generated within the framework of multi-stage sequential innovation? How does increasing early innovation appropriability affect basic research, applied research, education, and wage inequality? What does the...

This paper presents a standard endogenous growth framework in which the source of growth is represented by vertical innovation. The crucial assumption we introduce is that there is a positive information gap concerning the discovery of innovation. The aim of reducing the information...

We provide a re-foundation of the symmetric growth equilibrium characterizing the research sector of all vertical R&D-driven growth models. This result does not rely on the usual assumption of a symmetric expectation on the future per-sector R&D expenditure. Indeed, with this structure of...

To stay on top of global competition, firms and governments often need to acquire innovative goods and services, including ideas and research, from their strategic suppliers. A careful design of procurement policy is crucial to make potential suppliers generate and sell the most suitable...

Researchers aiming to invent and develop innovative products and processes need to be continuously updated about at least a minimum fraction of the last relevant innovations. If the flow of new ideas is too intense researchers spend most of their time reading and hearing. This never lasting...

Despite the huge economic value of the innovations, in European countries the yet unpatented results of the R&D activity can be stolen with little risk of criminal sanctions. By considering the anti-industrial espionage legislation in Europe, it turns out that no country has a law comparable to...

This paper introduces the monographic issue of Rivista di Politica Economica on “Intellectual Property, Competition, and Growth”. It presents the twelve contributions selected after a Callfor-Papers. The contributions deal with different facets of the protection of intellectual property...