We construct a tractable general equilibrium model of cumulative innovation and growth, in which new ideas strictly improve upon frontier technologies, and productivity improvements are drawn in a stochastic manner. The presence of positive knowledge spillovers implies that the decentralized...

This paper studies the incentives that developing countries have to protect intellectual properties rights (IPR). On the one hand, free-riding on rich countries technology reduces their investment cost in R&D. On the other hand, firm that violates IPR cannot legally export in a country that...

Recent empirical studies suggest a need for a flexible patent regime responding to industry characteristics. In practice, sector-specific modifications of patent strength already exist but lack theoretical foundation. This paper intends to make up for this neglect by scrutinizing in what...

Drawing on the reputation literature and signaling theory, this article builds on work that looks at patents as reputation signals. We build a multi-industry database of patents that expire due to lack of maintenance fee payments and test for a relationship between these patents and the firm’s...

Considerable advances, even breakthroughs, have been made during the last decades in our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and growth on one hand, and entrepreneurship and growth on the other. Similarly, more profound insights have also been gained as to how entrepreneurship,...

This paper develops a framework to appreciate the observed heterogeneity of firm size distributions and the entry and exit of products and firms associated with it. It is based on a model where new products are introduced by innovating firms in a quasi-temporal setting of monopolistic...

The paper focuses on challenges and potentials for policy in the presence of fundamental change processes that influence the long-term evolution of regions. The perspective in the paper implies that policy can be viewed as ‘management of change’. We present a conceptual model for...

In many countries entrepreneurship is promoted through tax reductions for small businesses and by various government support schemes. We analyze the effects of such policies to subsidize small businesses in a setting where both the risk-return characteristics of the selected innovation project...

It has been argued that monetary incentives restrain individual creativity and hamper performance in jobs requiring out of the box thinking. This paper reports from an experiment designed to test if the negative incentive effect is present also when individuals work together to solve such...

By merging individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth century with county level information on literacy and income tax revenues we show that increases in the stock of human capital not only improved workers’ productivity but also accelerated innovative...