Brevetti universitari e economia della ricerca in Italia, Europa e Stati Uniti. Una rassegna dell\u2019evidenza recente

The paper examines the most recent empirical studies on the impact of university patenting on the economics of public research. Most contributions discuss the controversial effects of the Bayh-Dole Act in the US, or attempt to measure the scope of university patenting in Europe. We highlight two main research lines. The first one deals with the possibility that patenting research tools may slow down scientific progress, whose cumulative nature requires free access to the stock of existing knowledge. The second comprises works that attempt to test the impact of patenting on the scientists\u2019 publication activity, at the individual level. It is shown that academic inventors publish more frequently than their peers who do not contribute to patenting; and that no apparent trade-off exists between publishing and patenting activities. On the contrary, a moderate trade-off exists at the systemic level, due to the fact that the existence of patents in given research field discourages other scientists to join the field, thus limiting the cumulative process of scientific advancement

The empirics of technology, employment and occupations:Lessons learned and challenges ahead

What have we learned, from the most recent years of debate and analysis, of the future of work being threatened by technology? This paper presents a critical review of the empirical literature and outlines both lessons learned and challenges ahead. Far from being fully exhaustive, the review intends to highlight common findings and main differences across economic studies. According to our reading of the literature, a few challenges-and also the common factors affecting heterogeneous outcomes across studies-still stand, including (i) the variable used as a proxy for technology, (ii) the level of aggregation of the analyses, (iii) the deep heterogeneity of different types of technologies and their adopted mix, (iv) the structural differences across adopters, and (v) the actual combination of the organisational practices in place at the establishment level in affecting net job creation/destruction and work re-organisation

Predictions for Nongaussianity from Nonlocal Inflation

In our previous work the nonlinearity parameter f_NL, which characterizes nongaussianity in the cosmic microwave background, was estimated for a class of inflationary models based on nonlocal field theory. These models include p-adic inflation and generically have the remarkable property that slow roll inflation can proceed even with an extremely steep potential. Previous calculations found that large nongaussianity is possible; however, the technical complications associated with studying perturbations in theories with infinitely many derivatives forced us to provide only an order of magnitude estimate for f_NL. We reconsider the problem of computing f_NL in nonlocal inflation models, showing that a particular choice of field basis and recent progress in cosmological perturbation theory makes an exact computation possible. We provide the first quantitatively accurate computation of the bispectrum in nonlocal inflation, confirming our previous claim that it can be observably large. We show that the shape of the bispectrum in this class of models makes it observationally distinguishable from Dirac-Born-Infeld inflation models.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures; references added, sign convention for f_NL clarified, minor correction

La formazione dei salari: un\u2019analisi strutturale

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Intellectual Property Rights and Knowledge Transfer from Public Research to Industry in US and Europe: which Lessons for Innovation Systems in Developing Countries?

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