Growth and Welfare Effects of Intellectual Property Rights When Consumers Differ in Income

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property (IP) protection affects economic growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with empirical evidence, rich households consume a larger variety of goods than poorer ones. The effects of IP protection on growth can be either positive or negative, depending on the distribution of income and wealth. Given that increasing the length of IP protection increases growth, poorer households prefer a shorter length of protection than richer ones