We investigate rewards to R&D in a model where substitute ideas for innovation arrive to random recipients at random times. By foregoing investment in a current idea, society as a whole preserves an option to invest in a better idea for the same market niche, but with delay. Because successive...

We consider a model of the innovative environment where there is a distinction between ideas for R\&D investments and the investments themselves. We investigate the optimal reward policy and how it depends on whether ideas are scarce or obvious. By foregoing investment in a current idea, society...

This paper presents a model of vehicle choice and then empirically examines the risk posed by light trucks (sport-utility vehicles, vans, and pickups) to those that drive them and to other drivers, relative to the risk posed by cars. The paper examines both the relative risk of dying given a...

The trickle of business method patents issued by the United States Patent Office became a flood after the State Street Bank decision in 1998. Many scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decision itself. This paper discusses the likely impact...

The recent surge in U.S. patenting and expansion of patentable subject matter has increased patent office backlogs and raised concerns that in some cases patents of insufficient quality or with inadequate search of prior art are being issued. At the same time patent litigation and its costs are...

Over the last two decades an unprecedented increase in private vehicle ownership has taken place in the developing world. This growth is due, in part, to increased international trade in used vehicles. In this paper we use theory and empirical evidence to evaluate the environmental implications...

Traditional trade theory obtains that international integration always yields large potential welfare benefits, even in a static constant returns competitive economy. Such a result however can only be maintained in a world bereft of its institutional and cultural dimensions. In this paper we...

As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent...