This chapter examines the contributions that economists have made to the study of science and the types of contributions the profession is positioned to make in the future. Special emphasis is placed on the public nature of knowledge and characteristics of the reward structure that encourage the...

The existing literature identifies patent thickets indirectly. In this paper we propose a novel measure based on patent citations which allows us to measure the density of patent thickets directly. We discuss the algorithm which generates the measure and present descriptive results validating...