We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find large effects of the prizes on competitive entry and we also detect an impact of the prizes...

Variations in levels of embodied technology generated variations in English plough prices in 1770. Using plough prices as a quality index, this article explains size and daily output of plough teams. It shows that variations in plough technology were due to technological change - not static...

This paper explores whether the patent law and intellectual property rights (IPR) system have resulted in innovation in China during the reform period. It appears that the patent laws have produced a stock of patents, where the success rates of patent applications are fairly uniform across the...

This paper begins by surveying recent economic studies of the relationships between technology transfer, intellectual property, innovation and diffusion in emerging countries.  It applies this literature to the Indian case.  India  is a potentially useful case study for several reasons. ...

Economists view intellectual property rights (IPRs) as policy tools for encouraging innovation. There are many types of IPRs and of institutions concerned with their administration. We begin by outlining how these complex and varied rights are supposed to work and how they interact with other...

Using novel data on European firms, this paper examines the effect of business group affiliation on innovation. We find that business groups foster the scale and novelty of corporate innovation. Group affiliation is particularly important in industries that rely more on external finance and have...