| This dissertation consists of three essays on some economic implications of intellectual property rights. These implications include the effect of differential degree of intellectual property rights protection of basic research on the investment incentives and the social welfare in cumulative innovations, and the effect of strengthening intellectual property, rights in developing countries on their imports.; Chapter 2 studies the optimal patent protection of basic research in cumulative innovation, using a two-stage patent-race model. It assumes that the two stages of innovation are basic research and commercial product development, and they, are performed by separate firms. The main findings from this chapter are as follows. Investment in basic research initially increases and then decreases in the degree of patent protection of the basic research. Investment in commercial development always decreases in the degree of protection of the basic research.; Chapter 3 has two goals. The first goal is to collect facts about the characteristics of biotechnology licensing contracts and compare them with evidence for other industries. The second goal is to find out whether university and private sector licensing contracts differ in their characteristics. Chapter 3 makes several findings. First, the incidence of licensing, both as a form of inter-firm contract and as a form of technology transfer, is much larger in the biotechnology sector than in other high-tech industries. Second, the large majority of biotechnology licensing contracts, both university and private, arrange the transfer of early-stage technologies. Third, both university and private contracts commonly include sponsored research. Next, the incidence of licensing between parties with previous contractual relations is more common in university licensing than in private sector licensing.; In Chapter 4, I attempt to test the static theory of IPRs and international trade for a sample of 17 developing countries, which have reformed their IPR legislations in the 1980s and the I 990s. The theoretical prediction is that stronger IPRs are more likely to increase the imports of countries with high imitative abilities and are more likely to decrease the imports of countries of low imitative abilities. However, these predictions may be affected by other characteristics of the trade policy of the importing country, and by the fact that exporting firms may respond to IPR reforms not only through exports but also through FDIs and licensing. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
