This paper examines the effect of wealth concentration on firms' market power when firm entry is driven by entrepreneurs facing uninsurable idiosyncratic risks. Under greater wealth concentration, households in the lower end of the wealth distribution are more risk averse and less willing (or...

From a firm’s perspective two competing forces are driving the decision to invest in innovation. On the one hand, innovative performance is an important driver of profitability and growth. On the other hand, investments in innovation suffer from negative externalities, i.e. spillovers to other...

This paper argues that, although AI machines are increasingly able to produce outputs that facially qualify for copyright or patent protection, such outputs should not be protected by law when they have no identifiable human cause, that is, when the autonomy of the machine is such that it breaks...

When commentators discuss innovation’s externalities, they often classify them into one of two categories. On the positive externalities, or “spillovers” side, legal and economics scholars often speak of the benefits innovation confers on other innovators. Future innovators profit from...

Patents are legal delinquents. A growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates that patents repeatedly fail to fulfill the responsibilities they have been assigned in fostering innovation. But I argue here that in their moments of misbehavior, we can catch a glimpse of the social roles patents...

Developing countries frequently offer tax incentives and even subsidize the entry and operation of foreign firms. I examine the optimality of such policies in an economy where growth is driven by entrepreneurial know-how, a skill that is continuously updated on the basis of the productive ideas...

The patent system gives the courts discretion to tailor patentability standards flexibly across technologies to provide optimal incentives for innovation. For chemical inventions, the courts deem them unpatentable if the chemical lacks a practical, non-research-based use at the time patent...

[This version of the “version group” adds new content (including additional respondents, more descriptive information from and about the respondents, and more discussion of the method) to the earlier SSRN version at 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2240940' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2240940.] We...

The dominant current perception in patent law is that the core requirement of nonobviousness is applied too leniently, resulting in a proliferation of patents on trivial inventions that actually retard technological innovation in the long run. This Article reveals that the common wisdom is only...

From a firm’s perspective two competing forces are driving the decision to invest in innovation. On the one hand, innovative performance is an important driver of profitability and growth. On the other hand, investments in innovation suffer from negative externalities, i.e. spillovers to other...