I use intuition derived from several of my research papers to make three points. First, in the absence of a common law balancing test, application of uniform patentability criteria favors some industries over others. Policymakers must decide the optimal tradeoff across industries. Second, if patent rights are not closely related to the underlying inventions, more patenting may reduce R&D in ind...

Female Migration and Native Marital Stability: Insights from Italy* In this paper, we argue that the size and the composition of the female migrant population in a given area can affect the marital stability of natives. We take Italy as a case-study and we offer discrete-time event history models predicting marital disruption on data from the nationally – representative 2009 Family and Social S...

Using new data on citations to university patents and scienti…c publications, we study how geography a¤ects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance up to about 150 miles and are strongly constrained by state borders. Distance also constrains citations to scienti…c publications, but the impact is less sharp and persists over greater distances. The stat...

This paper analyzes the impact of the skill composition of the working labor force on the innovative activity of firms when there is both an imperfect labor market and monopolistic competition on the product market. The labor market imperfections arise through a kind of insider outsider mechanism where in the bargaining round the union attaches a greater weight to the wage and employment intere...

We study optimal contracting in a setting that combines experimentation and adverse selection. In our leading example, an entrepreneur (agent) is better informed than the investor (principal) about both the quality the project (risky arm’s distribution) and the entrepreneur’s outside option (payoff of the safe arm). The investor’s profit-maximizing mechanism can be uniquely implemented with a m...

The paper investigates the differences between small, medium-sized and large firms regarding their performance in the introduction of new products and processes. After a review of the relevant literature, two models are proposed and tested in search for different business strategies and innovation inputs connected to product and process innovations. The empirical analysis uses innovation survey...

The aim of the paper is to investigate the process of spatial agglomeration of innovation and production activities and to assess the extent to which the degree of specialisation or diversity externalities in the area may affect the innovative output in a particular local industry. The analysis is carried out thanks to an original databank on innovation and production activity across 85 industr...

Previous research, notably Baumol (1990), has highlighted the role of institutions in channeling entrepreneurial supply into productive, unproductive or destructive activities. However, entrepreneurship is not only influenced by institutions— entrepreneurs often help shape institutions themselves. The bilateral causal relation between entrepreneurs and institutions is examined in this paper. En...

Innovation and the Determinants of Firm Survival * While many firms compete through the development of new technologies and products, it is well known that new-to-the-world innovation is inherently risky and therefore may increase the probability of firm death. However, many existing studies consistently find a negative association between innovative activity and firm death. We argue that this ...

We investigate the contribution of different inputs, particularly different knowledge sources, on regional patenting output in the framework of a knowledge production function. The knowledge sources included are R&D employment, size of public research institutions by field of research (number of employees, budget), amount of university external research funds from private firms, public departme...