Search Results
Journal Article
Intellectual property rights and product effectiveness
Recent economic literature concludes that an invention-importing country, where domestic invention is scarce or nonexistent, may reduce its welfare and, in some cases, world welfare, by protecting intellectual property developed elsewhere. The analysis presented in this article uses economic theory to show that such a conclusion may not be fully warranted for a wide range of products, such as antibiotics, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides, whose effectiveness diminishes with cumulative use. Both developed and developing countries may find that protecting intellectual property rights ...
Report
Intellectual property and market size
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 World Trade Organization, this trade-off changes. We show that, generally speaking, the socially optimal amount of protection decreases as the scale of the market increases. We also provide simple empirical estimates of how much it should decrease.
Journal Article
The Tenth District's brain drain: who left and what did it cost?
Most of the Tenth Federal Reserve District states experienced a brain drain, or an outmigration of highly educated people, during the last half of the 1980s. Fortunately, the recent tide of migration appears to have turned for some district states. Yet, it is still important for policymakers to understand the full impact of a brain drain on a state's economy. Highly educated people are prone to move, based on their region's economic performance relative to other parts of the country. Thus, current favorable migration trends in the district could easily be reversed.
Report
The economics of ideas and intellectual property
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 the pitfalls of existing institutions, and how they might be improved. We highlight recent research by ourselves and others challenging the notion that government awards of monopoly through patents and copyright are ?the way? to provide appropriate incentives for innovation.
Journal Article
Research spotlight : Fine-tuning
Working Paper
Protecting social interest in free invention
Journal Article
Intellectual property protection in a globalizing era
Working Paper
Implications of Intellectual Property Rights for Dynamic Gains from Trade
A simple intellectual property rights (IPRs) framework is introduced into a dynamic quality ladder model of technological diffusion between innovating firms in one country and imitating firms in another country. The presence of technological spillovers and feedback effects between firms in the two countries demonstrates that, even when steady state growth increases, transition costs sometimes dominate steady state welfare gains. Most existing models of international IPRs find that high intellectual property enforcement in the imitating country leads to welfare gains in the innovating country ...
