The Escape-Infringement Effect of Blocking Patents on Innovation and Economic Growth

This study develops a Schumpeterian growth model to analyze the effects of different patent instruments on innovation. We first analyze patent breadth that captures the traditional positive effect of patent rights on innovation. Then, we consider a profit-division rule between entrants and incumbents. Given the division of profit, increasing the share of profit assigned to incumbents reduces entrants' incentives for innovation. This aspect of blocking patents captures the recently proposed negative effect of patent rights on innovation. Finally, blocking patents generate a non-monotonic effect on innovation when the step size of innovation is endogenous due to a novel escape-infringement effect. Calibrating the model to aggregate data, we find that a marginal increase in the blocking effect of patent protection is likely to raise economic growth.economic growth; innovation; intellectual property rights

Broken Down by Work and Sex: How Our Health Declines

Self-reported health status (SRHS) is an imperfect measure of non-fatal health, but allows examination of how health status varies over the life course. Although women have lower mortality than men, they report worse health status up to age 65. The SRHS of both men and women deteriorates with age. There are strong gradients, so that at age 20, men in the bottom quartile already report worse health than do men in the top quartile at age 50. In the bottom quartile of income, SRHS declines more rapidly with age, but only until retirement age. These facts motivate a study of the role of work, particularly manual work, in health decline with age. The Grossman capital-stock model of health assumes a technology in which money and time can effect complete health repair. As a result, declines in health status are driven, not by the rate of deterioration of the health stock, but by the rate of increase of the rate of deterioration. We argue that such a technology is implausible, and we show that people in manual occupations have worse SRHS and more rapidly declining SRHS, even with a comprehensive set of controls for income and education. We also find that much of the differences in SRHS across the income distribution is driven by health-related absence from the labor-force, which is a mechanism running from health to income, not the reverse.

From China with love: Effects of the Chinese economy on skill-biased technical change in the US

In this study, we analyze the effects of labor shortage in China on the direction of innovation in the US by incorporating production offshoring into a North-South model of directed technical change. We �find that if offshoring is present (absent) in equilibrium, then a decrease (an increase) in unskilled labor in the South would lead to skill-biased technical change in the North. This fi�nding highlights the different implications of offshoring and conventional trade on innovation. Furthermore, we �find that an increase in the Southern stock of capital reduces offshoring and also leads to skill-biased technical change. Therefore, rapid capital accumulation and labor shortage in China could lead to a rising skill premium in the US. Calibrating the model to China-US data, we �find that a 1% decrease in unskilled labor (1% increase in capital) in China leads to a 0.8% (0.6%) increase in the skill premium in the US under a moderate elasticity of substitution between skill-intensive and labor-intensive goods

Enabling scalability by partitioning virtual environments using frontier sets

We present a class of partitioning scheme that we have called frontier sets. Frontier sets build on the notion of a potentially visible set (PVS). In a PVS, a world is subdivided into cells and for each cell all the other cells that can be seen are computed. In contrast, a frontier set considers pairs of cells, A and B. For each pair, it lists two sets of cells (two frontiers), FAB and FBA. By definition, from no cell in FAB is any cell in FBA visible and vice versa. Our initial use of frontier sets has been to enable scalability in distributed networking. This is possible because, for example, if at time t0 Player1 is in cell A and Player2 is in cell B, as long as they stay in their respective frontiers, they do not need to send update information to each other. In this paper we describe two strategies for building frontier sets. Both strategies are dynamic and compute frontiers only as necessary at runtime. The first is distance-based frontiers. This strategy requires precomputation of an enhanced potentially visible set. The second is greedy frontiers. This strategy is more expensive to compute at runtime, however it leads to larger and thus more efficient frontiers. Network simulations using code based on the Quake II engine show that frontiers have significant promise and may allow a new class of scalable peer-to-peer game infrastructures to emerge

Special Interest Politics and Intellectual Property Rights: An Economic Analysis of Strengthening Patent Protection in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Since the 80’s, the pharmaceutical industry has benefited substantially from a series of policy changes that have strengthened the patent protection for brand-name drugs as a result of the industry’s political influence. This paper incorporates special interest politics into a quality-ladder model to analyze the policymakers’ tradeoff between the socially optimal patent length and campaign contributions. The welfare analysis suggests that the presence of a pharmaceutical lobby distorting patent protection is socially undesirable in a closed-economy setting but may improve social welfare in a multi-country setting, which features an additional efficiency tradeoff between monopolistic distortion and international free-riding on innovations.campaign contributions; intellectual property rights; patent length; special interest politics

A Politico-Economic Analysis of the European Union’s R&D Policy

This paper provides a politico-economic analysis of the European Union’s (EU) R&D policy. It develops an open-economy R&D-growth model characterized by two parameters that capture respectively the degree of technology spillover and the effectiveness of lobbying. In a non-cooperative equilibrium, each country chooses the level of R&D subsidy independently and fails to internalize technology spillover. Consequently, R&D subsidy is underprovided. In an economic union, the central government internalizes technology spillover but is vulnerable to lobbying by politicians from each country, who attempt to free-ride on the central government budget. Consequently, R&D subsidy is overprovided; however, this overprovision becomes less severe as the degree of technology spillover increases. Therefore, technology spillover has a surprisingly positive effect on welfare in an economic union. As for the effect on relative welfare, there is a cutoff value for the degree of technology spillover such that if and only if spillover is above this threshold, then an economic union dominates independent countries in welfare. Furthermore, this threshold is an increasing function in the effectiveness of lobbying. This paper also considers the possibility that the EU faces a binding budget ceiling. In this case, lobbying on R&D subsidy exerts a distortionary effect on revenue allocation, and hence a welfare loss continues to exist.endogenous growth; policy coordination; lobbying; R&D subsidy

Applications of high power lasers

The use of computer generated, reflection holograms in conjunction with high power lasers for precision machining of metals and ceramics was investigated. The Reflection holograms which were developed and made to work at both optical wavelength (He-Ne, 6328 A) and infrared (CO2, 10.6) meet the primary practical requirement of ruggedness and are relatively economical and simple to fabricate. The technology is sufficiently advanced now so that reflection holography could indeed be used as a practical manufacturing device in certain applications requiring low power densities. However, the present holograms are energy inefficient and much of the laser power is lost in the zero order spot and higher diffraction orders. Improvements of laser machining over conventional methods are discussed and addition applications are listed. Possible uses in the electronics industry include drilling holes in printed circuit boards making soldered connections, and resistor trimming

A statistical approach to identify superluminous supernovae and probe their diversity

We investigate the identification of hydrogen-poor superluminous supernovae (SLSNe I) using a photometric analysis, without including an arbitrary magnitude threshold. We assemble a homogeneous sample of previously classified SLSNe I from the literature, and fit their light curves using Gaussian processes. From the fits, we identify four photometric parameters that have a high statistical significance when correlated, and combine them in a parameter space that conveys information on their luminosity and color evolution. This parameter space presents a new definition for SLSNe I, which can be used to analyse existing and future transient datasets. We find that 90% of previously classified SLSNe I meet our new definition. We also examine the evidence for two subclasses of SLSNe I, combining their photometric evolution with spectroscopic information, namely the photospheric velocity and its gradient. A cluster analysis reveals the presence of two distinct groups. `Fast' SLSNe show fast light curves and color evolution, large velocities, and a large velocity gradient. `Slow' SLSNe show slow light curve and color evolution, small expansion velocities, and an almost non-existent velocity gradient. Finally, we discuss the impact of our analyses in the understanding of the powering engine of SLSNe, and their implementation as cosmological probes in current and future surveys.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, accepted by ApJ on 23/01/201