reference library

In this paper we analyse whether firms that are concerned with corporate social responsibility (CSR) are willing to disclose their R&D knowledge for free. Assuming strategic R&D with endogenous spillovers…
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We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent…
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This paper studies how innovative firms manage their innovation portfolios after filing for Chapter 11 reorganization using three decades of data. We find that they sell off core (i.e., technologically…
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We show how characterizing optimal patent policy for the pharmaceutical industry only requires information about generic producers’ responses to changes in the effective duration and scope of new drug patents….
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In this work, we attempt to provide a comprehensive granular account of the pace of technological change. More specifically, we survey estimated yearly performance improvement rates for nearly all definable…
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Direct public support for business R&D is a well-established remedy to market failures, yet empirical evidence on its effectiveness yields conflicting results. The paper investigates the impact of the first…
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The importance of new technologies derives from the fact that they spread across many different users and uses, as well as different geographic regions. The diffusion of technological improvements, across…
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An entrepreneur finances her project via crowdfunding. She chooses a funding mechanism (fixed or flexible), a price, and a funding goal. Under fixed funding, money is refunded if the goal…
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This paper examines the U.S. government’s intramural research and development efforts over a 40-year period, drawing together multiple human capital, government spending, and patent datasets. The U.S. Federal Government innovates…
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I survey some recent research on the role of patents in encouraging innovation and growth in developing economies, beginning with a brief history of international patent systems and facts about…
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Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk…
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Many economics journals have recently invested in efforts to archive and curate research data and promote reproducible research. The economics profession has focused relatively less attention on what types of…
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Patents and other intellectual property (IP) have grown in relative importance in investments and market capitalizations of public firms (e.g., Corrado and Hulten 2010). This paper illustrates the construction of…
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Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates…
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Standard-essential patents (SEPs) have become a key element of technical coordination in standard-setting organizations. Yet, in many cases, it remains unclear whether a declared SEP is truly standard-essential. To date,…
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In 2004, Canada changed the eligibility rules for its Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) tax credit, which provides tax incentives for R&D conducted by small private firms. Difference-in-difference estimates…
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Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of…
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This chapter provides an overview of grant funding as an innovation policy tool aimed at both practitioners and science policy scholars. We first discuss how grants relate to other contractual…
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This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights – as a result of the timing of Napoléon’s military victories in Italy – to examine the effects of copyrights…
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Innovation is important for firm performance and broader economic growth. But breakthrough innovations necessarily require greater risk-taking than more incremental approaches. To understand how managers respond to uncertainty when making…
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Whenever policymakers consider approaches to reduce drug spending, the pharmaceutical industry sings a familiar refrain— any reduction in drug manufacturer revenues will cause investment to wither, depriving manufacturers of the…
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As yet another coronavirus spreads around the globe, scientists are once again trying to develop new treatments and vaccines. Much remains unknown about this family of viruses. But we know…
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Understanding the profitability of pharmaceutical companies is essential to formulating evidence-based policies to reduce drug costs while maintaining the industry’s ability to innovate and provide essential medicines. This cross-sectional study…
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The mean cost of developing a new drug has been the subject of debate, with recent estimates ranging from $314 million to $2.8 billion. Data were analyzed on new therapeutic…
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Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance…
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We explore how firms grow by adding products. In contrast to most earlier work on the topic, our conceptual and empirical framework allows for separate treatment of product innovation (vertical…
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This Article argues that U.S. copyright law provides a competitive advantage in the global race for innovation policy because it permits researchers to conduct computational analysis — text and data…
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We analyze wartime prosthetic device patents to investigate how procurement policy affects the cost, quality, and quantity of medical innovation. Analyzing whether inventions emphasize cost and/or quality requires generating new…
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The economic valuation of intellectual property is an area with which IP professionals still need to fully come to grips with. In the context of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), the…
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This paper exploits variation in the adoption of copyright laws – due to idiosyncratic variation in the timing of Napoléon’s military victories – to investigate the causal effects of copyright…
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This article deals with a period of transition for most patent systems in Europe and North America, from instruments of royal prerogative power to specialized and statute-based weapons of capitalist…
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This paper describes the results of an inquiry into appropriability conditions in more than one hundred manufacturing industries. We discuss how this information has been and might be used to…
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A defining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the U.S. has…
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In keeping with our mandate to provide advice on the broad range of policy issues raised by the development and use of genetic technologies as well as our charge to…
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Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright. A…
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We study reward-based crowdfunding campaigns, a new class of dynamic contribution games where consumption is exclusive. Two types of backers participate: buyers want to consume the product while donors just…
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In recent years, there has been a growing push towards state legislation that would provide consumers with a “right to repair” their products. Currently 18 states have pending legislation that…
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How do non-practicing entities (“Patent Trolls”) impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new…
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Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper…
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In the rogues’ gallery of regulatory rent-seeking, copyright and patent laws are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. According to the ingenious and highly effective rhetoric of their beneficiaries and supporters,…
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No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the…
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How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? Although disclosure is regarded as essential to the functioning of the patent system, legal scholars have expressed considerable skepticism about…
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly and countries from around the globe are beginning to articulate national strategies for handling the political ramifications. Powering innovations like driverless cars, autonomous drones,…
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Historically, and consistently, direct copyright infringement has been understood to be a strict liability tort. Unfortunately, some recent lower court decisions addressing infringement of copyrighted content on online platforms could…
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“We analyze the role that the launch of new drugs has played in reducing the number of years of life lost (YLL) before 3 different ages (85, 70, and 55)…
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This report analyzes the twelve best selling drugs in the United States and reveals that drugmakers file hundreds of patent applications – the vast majority of which are granted –…
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Domestic patent, copyright and trademark regimes are traditionally justified on an incentive rationale. While international intellectual property agreements are nominally aimed at harnessing global markets to expand incentives, this article…
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Patent protection is assumed to benefit entrepreneurs seeking investment, because patents signal quality and are an asset that can be resold if a startup fails. This column argues that the…
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This paper analyzes how patent-induced shocks to labor productivity propagate into worker compensation using a new linkage of US patent applications to US business and worker tax records. We infer…
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A large number of countries around the world now provide some kind of tax incentive to encourage firms to undertake innovative activity. This paper presents the policy rationale for these…
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This paper raises three issues on the relationship between intellectual property and inequality. The first is a simple logical point. Patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property are public…
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We analyze how frivolous patent-infringement claims made by non-practicing entities (NPEs, or “patent trolls”) affect startups’ ability to grow and create jobs, innovate, and raise capital. Our identification strategy exploits…
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Frivolous patent-infringement claims increase the cost of innovation for small businesses and force them to exit via premature and discounted acquisitions. This study investigates the effect of abusive patent-infringement claims…
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The deadweight loss from a monopolist’s not producing at all can be much greater than from charging too high a price. The column argues that the potential for this sort…
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“In a remarkably short time viewed in a historical context, the lives of billions of people worldwide have been transformed for the better through innovation and creativity. Intellectual property (IP)…
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We introduce, validate, and provide a public database of a new measure of the knowledge inventors draw on: scientific references in patent specifications. These references are common and algorithmically extractable….
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I argue that the growing dominance of patent analysis not only fails to provide valuable and reliable insight into innovation processes, but is a smoke screen that prevents social scientists…
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The present study examines the importance of Schumpeterian profits in the United States economy. Schumpeterian profits are defined as those profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the…
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We begin this paper by tracing the growth of the venture capital industry over the past 40 years, noting how technological and institutional changes have narrowed the focus and concentrated…
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Using data on 800,000 corporate publications and patent citations to these publications between 1980 and 2015, we study how corporate investment in research is linked to its use in the…
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When investing in research and development (R&D), institutions must decide whether to take a top-down approach — soliciting a particular technology — or a bottom-up approach in which innovators suggest…
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This staff report describes the actions of Celgene Corporation and Bristol Myers Squibb Company in repeatedly raising the price of Revlimid, a critical drug to treat multiple myeloma and other…
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Big Pharma’s innovation argument just does not stand up to scrutiny. We can’t allow drug corporations to continue to hide behind their threat that if we do anything to curb…
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The age-old clash between celebrities and paparazzi has reached a new high. With the trend moving towards the monetization of social media, evolution in mobile camera technology, and lighting-fast sharing…
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Every year, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry develops a variety of new drugs that provide valuable medical benefits. Many of those drugs are expensive and contribute to rising health care costs…
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Technical progress increasingly relies on the use of scientific knowledge. But if much of this knowledge is in the public domain, can it be a source of private value? We…
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One of the key recommendations of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine is to take a societal perspective when evaluating new technologies—including measuring the productivity benefits of…
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Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for a deeper understanding of the role of science in human society. While science is heavily supported by public…
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When judges change the legal rules governing patents, those changes are always retroactive. That is, they apply equally to patents that have already been granted and patents that do not…
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As the U.S. patent system has weakened, venture capital investment shifted away from patentintensive industries. We supplemented our exhaustive review of 14 years of data tracking VC investment by talking…
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We analyse whether research funding contests promote co-authorship. Our analysis combines Scopus publication records with data on applications to the Marsden Fund, the premiere source of funding for basic research…
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To examine the drivers of innovation, this paper studies the global R&D effort to fight the deadliest diseases and presents four results. We find: (1) global pharmaceutical R&D activity—measured by…
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If a litigated patent has previously been licensed to a third party, the courts generally adopt the terms of the prior agreement as the best measure of damages. However, while…
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Continuations allow inventors to claim technology developed after the original filing date of their patent, leading to concerns about inadvertent infringement and hold-up. We use the link between patents and…
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We study the innovation and diffusion of technology at the industry level. We derive the full dynamic paths of an industry’s evolution, from birth to its maturity, and we characterize…
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If innovation is to be subsidized, a natural place to start is to increase the quantity and quality of human capital. Innovation, after all, begins with people. Simply stimulating the…
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In the past several decades, the U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism. In this paper,…
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IP rights have come under attack from a loose coalition of academics, nongovernmental organizations, multilateral groups, and others whose opposition threatens to undermine innovation, growth, and progress on key global…
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Innovation is the only way for the most developed countries to secure sustainable long-run productivity growth. For nations farther from the technological frontier, catch-up growth is a viable option, but…
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The goal of antitrust policy is to protect and promote a vigorous competitive process. Effective rivalry spurs firms to introduce new and innovative products, as they seek to capture profitable…
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This work examines the contribution of NIH funding to published research associated with 210 new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. We identified >2…
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Research and development in software contributes to emerging research, investment, and economic policy areas, such as artificial intelligence, information and communication technologies (ICT), and the digital economy. Accordingly, software R&D…
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We show evidence of localized knowledge spillovers using a new database of U.S. patent interferences terminated between 1998 and 2014. Interferences resulted when two or more independent parties submitted identical…
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In the U.S. alone, an average of 12,000 intellectual property (IP) cases are filed in federal court each year; to put that into context, each year there are approximately 6,400…
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The pharmaceutical industry accounts for a substantial chunk of the US economy’s research and development investments, which have resulted in significant medical breakthroughs. At the same time, the costs of…
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Intellectual property scholars have vigorously debated the merits of patents versus prizes for encouraging innovation, with occasional consideration of government grants. But these are not the only options. Perhaps most…
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This paper evaluates the ability of “forced technology transfer” (FTT) policies – i.e., policies meant to increase foreign-domestic technology transfer that simultaneously weaken appropriability of foreign innovations – to contribute…
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The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons”…
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This paper examines how intellectual property rights (IPR) protection affects innovation and foreign direct investment (FDI) using a North–South quality-ladder model incorporating the exogenous and costless imitation of technology and…
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During World War II, the U.S. government launched an unprecedented effort to mobilize science for war: the newly-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) entered thousands of R&D contracts…
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This paper outlines a quantitative global multi-region model to assess the importance of country-level investment incentives towards innovation at the level of 5,633 regions of heterogeneous size. While incentives vary…
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Innovation increasingly relies on scientific knowledge. Research to generate that knowledge has historically been funded by both industry and government. Although industry and government research spending was relatively equal in…
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This report surveys the empirical literature from economics and related fields on patents and innovation. In particular, it reviews and synthesizes the empirical evidence on patents and first-generation innovation, the…
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There is growing concern that dominant companies use patents strategically to keep competitors from entering their market. This column uses the landmark 1956 Consent Decree against Bell Labs to explore…
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The standard economic rationale for the alienability of property rights is that it facilitates the flow of resources to those who can put it to the most valuable use, or…
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We study how competition between two downstream firms affects an upstream innovator’s innovation strategy, which includes selecting how much innovation to produce and whether to license this innovation to one…
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Have the Supreme Court’s recent patent eligibility cases changed the behavior of venture capital and private equity investment firms, and if so how? This Article provides empirical data about investors’…
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This book chapter examines the relationship between intellectual property protection and economic development. It begins by exploring the conventional linkage between intellectual property protection and foreign direct investment. The chapter…
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“Patent monopolies on prescription drugs raise their price by one or two orders of magnitude above the free market price. In this way, they are equivalent to tariffs of several…
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The extent to which scientific advances support marketplace inventions is largely unknown. We study 4.8 million U.S. patents and 32 million research articles to determine the minimum citation distance between…
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