We analyse the determinants of the decline in research productivity using panel data on manufacturing firms in the US for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents and technological exhaustion. We develop an index of patent 'quality' using...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control...

We model early expectations about the value and technological importance ('quality') of a patented innovation as a latent variable common to a set of four indicators: the number of patent claims, forward citations, backward citations and family size. The model is estimated for four technology...

This paper investigates the characteristics of litigated patents by combining for the first" time information about patent case filings from the U.S. district courts and detailed data from the" U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We construct a series of indicators for the factors which the"...

We use a public economics framework to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the R&D incentive comes from sales revenues. We employ familiar techniques of public finance to relax some of the restrictions implied in the standard use of Ramsey pricing. In the more...

This paper examines the performance small area of welfare estimation. The method combines census and survey data to produce spatially disaggregated poverty and inequality estimates. To test the method, predicted welfare indicators for a set of target populations are compared with their true...

The rural non-farm sector has traditionally been viewed as a low-productivity sector which produces low quality goods. It is often expected to wither away as a country develops. Recent years have seen a shift away from this position towards recognition that the rural non-farm sector can, and...

We explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights using new survey data from Ecuador, where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property. We develop a model of property transactions that distinguishes between transferable and...