Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign-owned inventions without the consent of foreign patent owners. This paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensing after World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act to examine the long run effects of...

Previous studies have tended to focus on theeffect that patent laws have on number of innovations, ignoring the effect thatpatent laws have on technological change. Here, a data set of 15,000innovations at two World's Fairs--the London Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851and the Philadelphia...

Copyrights establish intellectual property in cultural goods, such as music, literature, and science. Intended to encourage creativity, they can however also create significant costs for later generations of authors, inventors, and composers. This paper examines the effects of such costs on...

A significant challenge to empirically testing theories of discrimination has been the difficulty of identifying taste-based discrimination and of distinguishing it clearly from statistical discrimination. This paper addresses this problem through a two-part empirical test of taste-based...

A growing empirical literature uses patent citations as a quality-adjusted measure for innovation, despite concerns about the validity of this measure. This paper links patents with objective measures of improvements in the quality of patented inventions – measured through performance in field...

Count data regressions are an important tool for empirical analyses ranging from analyses of patent counts to measures of health and unemployment. Along with negative binomial, Poisson panel regressions are a preferred method of analysis because the Poisson conditional fixed effects maximum...

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized U.S. science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the U.S. we compare changes in patenting by U.S. inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting...

This article exploits a differential increase in copyright under the UK Copyright Act of 1814 - in favor of books by dead authors – to examine the influence of longer copyrights on price. Difference-in-differences analyses, which compare changes in the price of books by dead and living...

Patents are the main source of data on innovation, but there are persistent concerns that patents may be a noisy and biased measure. An important challenge arises from unobservable variation in the size of the inventive step that is covered by a patent. The count of later patents that cite a...

This paper investigates whether compulsory licensing – which allows governments to license patents without the consent of patent-owners – discourages invention. Our analysis exploits new historical data on German patents to examine the effects of compulsory licensing under the US...