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on Intellectual Property Rights |
| By: | Carlos J. Serrano |
| Abstract: | The "market for innovation" — the sale and licensing of patents — is an often discussed source of incentives to invest in R&D. This article presents and estimates a model of the transfer and renewal of patents that, under some assumptions, allows us to quantify the gains resulting from the transfer of patents in the market for innovation. The gains from trade measure the benefits of reallocating the ownership of a patent from the original inventor to a new owner for whom the patent has a higher value. In addition, we study the effect that lowering the costs of technology transfer has on the proportion of patents traded and the gains from trade. |
| JEL: | L24 O32 O34 |
| Date: | 2011–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17304&r=ipr |
| By: | Toivanen, Otto; Väänänen, Lotta |
| Abstract: | Modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage. Inventions are created by individuals, raising the question: can we increase number of inventors? To answer this question, we study the causal effect of M.Sc. engineering education on invention, using data on U.S. patents’ Finnish inventors and the distance to the nearest technical university as an instrument. We find a positive effect of engineering education on the propensity to patent, and a negative OLS bias. Our counterfactual calculation suggests that establishing 3 new technical universities resulted in a 20% increase in the number of USPTO patents by Finnish inventors. |
| Keywords: | ability bias; citations; education; engineers; growth; innovation; invention; inventors; patents |
| JEL: | I21 J24 O31 |
| Date: | 2011–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8537&r=ipr |
| By: | Alireza Naghavi; Julia Spies; Farid Toubal |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we propose the technological complexity of a product and the level of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) protection to be the co-determinants of the mode through which multinational firms purchase their goods. We study the choice between intra-firm trade and outsourcing given heterogeneity at the product-(complexity), firm-(productivity) and country-(IPRs) level. Our findings suggest that the above three dimensions of heterogeneity are crucial for complex goods, where firms face a trade-off between higher marginal costs in the case of trade with an affiliate and higher imitation risks in the case of sourcing from an independent supplier. We test these predictions by combining data from a French firm-level survey on the mode choice for each transaction with a newly developed complexity measure at the product-level. Our fractional logit estimations confirm the proposition that although firms are generally reluctant to source highly complex goods from outside the firm’s boundaries, they do so when a strong IPR regime in the host country guarantees the protection of their technology. |
| Keywords: | Sourcing decision, product complexity, intellectual property rights, fractional logit estimation |
| JEL: | F12 F23 O34 |
| Date: | 2011–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iaw:iawdip:75&r=ipr |
| By: | Schäfer, Andreas; Schneider, Maik T. |
| Abstract: | While most countries have harmonized intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, the dispute about the optimal level of IPR-enforcement remains. This paper develops an endogenous growth framework with two open economies satisfying the classical North-South assumptions to study (a) IPR-enforcement in a decentralized game and (b) the desired globally-harmonized IPR-enforcement of the two regions. The results are compared to the constrained-efficient enforcement level. Our main insights are: The regions' desired harmonized enforcement levels are higher than their equilibrium choices, however, the gap between the two shrinks with relative market size. While growth rates substiantially increase when IPR-enforcement is harmonized at the North's desired level, our numerical simulation suggests that the South may also benefit in terms of long-run welfare. -- |
| Keywords: | Endogenous Growth,Intellectual Property Rights,Trade,Dynamic Game |
| JEL: | F10 F13 O10 O30 |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:leiwps:96&r=ipr |