Intellectual property protection involves a trade-off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. As the scale of the market increases, due either to economic and population growth or to the expansion of trade through treaties such as the...

We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In...

Innovation and the adoption of new ideas are fundamental to economic progress. Here we examine the underlying economics of the market for ideas. From a positive perspective, we examine how such markets function with and without government intervention. From a normative perspective, we examine...

This paper provides an interpretation of the evolution of Spanish private and national savings over the period 1960-1995. During these 35 years private and national saving rates oscillated widely from a very high level in the 1960s to historical minima in the early and mid-1980s to a strong...

In "Eldred and Fair Use," Posner comments that awarding a monopoly over Mickey Mouse avoids the congestion problem that occurs with open access highways. Is the public domain a commons like an open access highway? No, it is not.

Growth theorists have almost always adopted the assumption of balanced growth in their investigations of development phenomena. In reality countries growth rates oscillate, sometimes wildly, around some average value. The latter is often taken to represent the balanced rate to which the...

We study the asymptotic stability of infinite horizon concave programming problems. Turnpike theorems for this class of models generally have to assume a low level of discounting. By generalizing our precedent work we provide a one-parameter family of verifiable conditions that guarantee...

In this paper we study the indeterminacy of equilibria in infinite horizon capital accumulation models with technological externalities. Our investigation encompasses both models with bounded and unbounded accumulation paths, and models with one and two sectors of production. Under reasonable...