"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed...

Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent...

While patent systems have been widely used both historically and internationally, there is nonetheless a tremendous amount of controversy over whether patent systems - in practice - improve the alignment between private returns and social contributions. In this paper, I describe three parameters...

A long theoretical literature has analyzed optimal patent policy design, yet there is very little empirical evidence on a key parameter needed to apply these models in practice: the relationship between patent strength and research investments. I argue that the dearth of empirical evidence on...