Institutions, and more specifically private property rights, have come to be seen as a major determinant of long-run economic develop- ment. We evaluate the case for property rights as an explanatory factor of the Industrial Revolution and derive some lessons for the analysis of developing...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) – technology produced by workers but not embodied in them – can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises – more so in domestically owned...

In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show that top income inequality is (at least partly) driven by innovation. We first establish a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in cross-state panel regressions. Two distinct...

Within the context of an endogenous growth model with nonhomothetic preferences and income distribution, this paper analyzes whether there might be disagreement between rich and poor consumers about the optimal patent policy. In equilibrium, the poor and the rich differ with respect to the share...

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model to analyze the interaction between patent policy and firms’ internal strategies to capture value from innovations. We consider two dimensions of patent policy: backward protection against imitation and forward protection, also known as blocking patents,...

This paper explores the way that intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection affects firm-level productivity growth through innovation and diffusion. Allowing for conditional average treatment effect, I find strong evidence for heterogeneous effects of both patenting and importing activities...

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model with private IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) enforcement and investigate the implications for IPR and R&D policies. In our setting, successful innovators undertake costly activities to enforce their patents and protect their monopoly rents. These Rent...

Strategy scholars have documented in various empirical settings that firms seek and leverage stronger institutions to mitigate hazards and gain competitive advantage. In this paper, we argue that such “institution-seeking” behavior may not be confined to the pursuit of strong institutions:...

From the standpoint of policies, the different branches of economics may be aggregated into two categories: dirigiste and laissez fairist. Dirigiste theories in economics have been based primarily on the complexity of commodities: this allows commodities to be ranked according to the...