What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? One prominent line of thinking is trend toward stagnation. Stagnationism has a long history in economics, beginning prominently with Malthus and occasionally surfacing different guises. Prominent themes here following: Will growth slow perhaps even reverse under weight resource depletion? overpopulation diminishing returns lower living standa...

tered MRI Michal Komlosh 1, Evren Ozarslan 1, Martin Lizak 1, Peter Basser 1 1 National Institute of Health Introduction: White matter in the spinal cord consists of packs of long aligned nerve axons that conduct information between the brain and other parts of the body. The ability to measure an apparent fiber diameter and its spatial dis­ tribution within the spinal cord is of particular inte...

This paper constructs a two-sector unified growth model. Learning-by-doing in agriculture eventually allows the preindustrial economy to leave its Malthusian trap. But entrepreneurs in the manufacturing sector do not attempt invention if not much is known about natural phenomena. This delays the industrial revolution. Since entrepreneurs identify new useful knowledge at all times in a serendipi...

Nearly a decade after the Federal Circuit decision in State Street, patents on computerimplemented methods of doing business have become commonplace. To date, there is little evidence of any effect on the rate of innovation or R&D among firms in financial services. Indeed, measuring such effects presents difficult problems for researchers. We do know that some of these patents are successfully ...

In this study, I examine immaterial property rights in an economy where R&D firms innovate and imitate and households face nondiversifiable risk. Some property rights postpone the expected time an innovation will be imitated (e.g. increase the “length” of an innovation), while the others protect the imitator’s profits after a successful imitation (i.e. increase the “width” of an innovation). Th...

This paper analyses the impact of technological diversity on innovative activity at the firm level. The empirical study on a panel of European R&D active companies shows that both R&D intensity and patents increase with the degree of technological diversification of the firm. Possible explanations are that, on the one hand, a firm that diversifies its technology can receive more spillovers from...

Auctions with Private Entry Costs We study auctions where bidders have private information about their entry costs and the seller does not benefit from these entry costs. We consider a symmetric environment where all bidders have the same value for the object being sold, and also an asymmetric environment where bidders may have different valuations for the object. In these environments, the sel...

Universities are engaging in more licensing and patenting activities than ever before, and the amount of research funded by industry is increasing. Academics' commercialization activities may inhibit traditional academic scholarship. If the output of such scholarship is an important input into technological innovation and economic growth, then such an inhibition would be cause for concern. We i...

In this paper, IP strategy at firm level is analyzed in a framework of use of patent as a tool for maximizing firm’s revenue, based on a dataset from JPO’s Survey of Intellectual Property Activities in 2004. Descriptive regressions of IP strategy indicators suggest a non-linear relationship between firm size and licensing propensity. For a small firm with less complementary assets, such as prod...