The advantages and disadvantages of genetic modification of organisms in agriculture are reviewed. These relate to the environment, human health, socio-economic effects, population growth, and differential consequences for developed and developing countries. An overall evaluation requires that...

Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent...

Increased global demand for biofuels is placing increased pressure on agricultural systems at a time when traditional sources of yield improvements have been mostly exhausted, generating concerns about the future of food prices. This paper estimates the impact of global adoption of genetically...

Individual, personalized genetic information is increasingly available, leading to the possibility of greater adverse selection over time, particularly in individual-payer insurance markets; this selection could impact the viability of these markets. We use data on individuals at risk for...

Pharmacogenomics, or the application of genetic testing to guide drug selection and/or dosing, is often cited as integral to the vision of how precision medicine can be integrated into routine clinical practice. Yet despite a growing base of scientific discovery on genetic variation that...

We describe the broad range of uncertainties faced by the developers of medical technologies. Empirically, we estimate the asset market incidence of two realizations of uncertainties we classify as within-market policy risks. The events we analyze concern the intellectual property of Myriad...

This paper models how the evolving field of pharmacogenomics (PG), which is the science of using genomic markers to predict drug response, may impact drug development times, attrition rates, costs, and the future returns to research and development (R&D). While there still remains an abundance...

Meritocratic fairness justifies inequality when it stems from performance. Yet performance is influenced by one's genetics. I investigate whether individuals' redistribution preferences are affected by their beliefs about genetics' role in generating performance inequality. In an incentivized...

Profit on proprietary research tools is determined partly by the remedies for infringement, such as damages and injunctions. We investigate how damages under a liability rule and the opportunity for injunctions under a property rule can affect the incentives to develop research tools. We show...