Based on the example of the automobile and electronics sector in China, the article examines the technological learning of companies in China and the way it is influenced by industrial policy. Companies have consolidated their production capacity and technological learning but are rarely in the...

Innovations in consumer products frequently rely on technological advances across multiple tiers in a supply chain. Considering the consumer market demand and downstream investment conditions as input, we model a game in a two-tier supply chain where downstream firms choose to adopt different...

Using novel data from the pharmaceutical industry, we study the impact of mergers on product prices and innovation. Exploiting within-deal variation in product market consolidation, we show prices increase 2.4–3.5% more within drugs belonging to consolidating markets than within matched...

The Copyright Act grants authors and users a set of entitlements in copyrightable works. It is questionable whether and to what extent authors and users can reallocate these rights by entering into legally enforceable contracts. The Seventh Circuit’s historic decision in ProCD, Inc v...

Many manufacturing industries, including the computer industry, have seen large increases in productivity growth rates and have experienced a reduction in average establishment size and a decrease in the variance of the sizes of plants. A vintage capital model is introduced where learning...

We demonstrate the dual affects that regulatory rules and firms' complementary assets have on the timing of new product introductions in the pharmaceutical industry. We develop theory and evidence to explain how incumbent firms respond with new product introductions to a change in their...

Patent scope is central to the sale of ideas, which can spur economic growth and provide significant gains from trade. Awarding an inventor a patent on a new idea partially solves a commitment problem that would otherwise prevent the inventor from selling the idea. (Arrow, 1962). In the absence...

This paper describes an analytically tractable model of balanced growth that is consistent with the observed size distribution of firms. Growth is the result of idiosyncratic firm productivity improvements, selection of successful firms, and imitation by potential entrants. The empirical...

During the last 20 years, R&D and innovation activities in the service sector have clearly increased. Especially business services are believed to be one of the main drivers of technical changes and economic progress. Looking at the labour indices calculated over the period from 1982 to 1996 one...