The objective of patent rights is to foster innovation and economic growth. However, to date, there is little robust evidence that patents ldquo;workrdquo; as intended. Here, we study the impact of changes in effective patent rights within panels of up to 54 manufacturing industries in up to 72...

This study addresses the apparent puzzle that China achieved spectacular economic performance despite weak institutions. Using a World Bank survey of 1,566 manufacturing enterprises in 18 Chinese cities, we investigated whether property rights protection mattered for enterprise performance. We...

Here, we investigate the impact of differences over time and across states in the law of trade secrets on the efficiency of production in manufacturing, as represented by inventories. We find that stronger trade secrets protection was associated with lower inventories: a one standard deviation...

A major challenge in research on agglomeration of economic activity is acquiring information on the location of production and service facilities. Here, we present a new way of locating U.S. manufacturing based on the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The...