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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]