Governing Medical Knowledge Commons makes three claims: first, evidence matters to innovation policymaking; second, evidence shows that self-governing knowledge commons support effective innovation without prioritizing traditional intellectual property rights; and third, knowledge commons can...

Using firm-level data from the US Census Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), this paper exhibits novel evidence about a wave of specialization experienced by US firms in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically: 1) Firms, especially innovating ones, decreased production scope, i.e., the number of...

International technology transfer plays a critical role in global welfare and economic growth. Conventional wisdom holds that strong intellectual property rights—primarily patents—promote the transfer of technologies between countries. An important counternarrative, however, contends that...

This essay explores the nature, the functioning, and the economic and policy implications of markets for technology. Today, the outsourcing of research and development activities is more common than in the past, and specialized technology suppliers have emerged in many industries. In a sense,...

Coase’s theory of the firm has become a familiar tool to analyze the structure and organization of businesses. Such analyses have increasingly focused on property based theories of the firm, including intellectual property. In previous work we have discussed the application of this model to...

Intangible capital can be used to create new goods and services (product intangibles) or to improve the efficiency of the firm (process intangibles). We reveal and study a new empirical fact: Executive and skilled labor pay is increasing in firm process intensity (the fraction of intangibles...

In this paper, we experiment and adopt "new" economic approaches to interrogate some of the fundamental changes and continuities in the music industry "system" that have been produced as a result of digitalisation. In this experiment, we also include established techniques of media industries...

The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...

This paper examines the impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement on multinationals' choice of input suppliers and industry profits in a host economy. The framework consists of suppliers with heterogeneous capabilities who must engage in a relation-specific investment to customize...

We study the production of knowledge when many researchers or inventors are involved, in a setting where tensions can arise between individual public and private contributions. We first show that without some kind of coordination, production of the public knowledge good (science or research...