A large number of countries around the world now provide some kind of tax incentive to encourage firms to undertake innovative activity. This paper presents the policy rationale for these incentives, discusses their design and potential effectiveness, and reviews the empirical evidence on their...

I survey some recent research on the role of patents in encouraging innovation and growth in developing economies, beginning with a brief history of international patent systems and facts about the current use of patents around the world. I discuss research on the implications of patents for...

We revisit the effect of the "Eco-Patent Commons" (EcoPC) on the diffusion of patented environmentally friendly technologies following its discontinuation in 2016, using both participant survey and data analytic evidence. Established in January 2008 by several large multinational companies, the...

A "patent box" is a term for the application of a lower corporate tax rate to the income derived from the ownership of patents. This tax subsidy instrument has been introduced in a number of countries since 2000. Using comprehensive data on patent filings at the European Patent Office, including...

This paper extends earlier work on the RID to patents relationship (Pakes-Griliches 1980, and Hausman, Hall, and Griliches,1984) to a larger but shorter panel of firms. The focus of the paper is on solving a number of econometric problems associated with the discreteness of the dependent...

We use a large dataset of approximately 1500 physicists employed by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France to investigate the role of cumulative advantage in their publication career. Measuring output by time series of the number of publications and the number of...

We analyze how expropriation risk reduces incentives for innovation and reallocates resources from the innovative sector, building on Romer's(1990) model. Our framework predicts the R&D expenditure, the share of human capital in R&D, the number of patents, technical progress, and economic growth...

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. Econometric studies in this area report a plethora of sometimes confusing and frequently...

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus "additional" to private R&D spending, or does it substitute for and tend to "crowd out" private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. We survey the body of available economectric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years. A framework...

This paper looks more closely at the sources of patent growth in the United States since 1984. It confirms that the increase is largely due to US patenters, with an earlier surge in Asia, and some increase in Europe. Growth has taken place in all technologies, but not in all industries, being...