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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
Intellectual property protection in a globalizing era
Working Paper
Protecting social interest in free invention
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
Rent-seeking and innovation
Innovations and their adoption are the keys to growth and development. Innovations are less socially useful, but more profitable for the innovator, when they are adopted slowly and the innovator remains a monopolist. For this reason, rent-seeking, both public and private, plays an important role in determining the social usefulness of innovations. This paper examines the political economy of intellectual property, analyzing the trade-off between private and public rent-seeking. While it is true in principle that public rent-seeking may be a substitute for private rent-seeking, it is not true ...
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 ...