Administrative Delays as Barriers to Trade

One domestic firm and one foreign firm must decide when to introduce their new product to the home market. The home government may apply an import tariff, an administrative delay, or both to the product of the foreign firm. We show that, while both the tariff and administrative delay can ensure the socially optimal timing of entry, the administrative delay is the less efficient instrument for maximising home welfare. If trade liberalization constrains the import tariff to be below its domestically optimal level, we show that the optimal administrative delay leads to lower levels of world welfare than the optimal tariff, so that trade liberalization can be welfare decreasing.

Are More Important Patents Approved More Slowly and Should They Be?

Innovative activities often are heavily regulated. Reviews conducted by administrative agencies take time and are not perfectly accurate. Of particular concern is whether, by design or not, such agencies discriminate against more important innovations by taking more time to perform their reviews. We study the relationship between the length of patent review and the importance of inventions in a theoretical model. We find that, controlling for the importance of innovations, the welfare-maximising patent approval delay decreases over time. Second, controlling for a patent's position in the new technology cycle, the optimal examination time decreases with the importance of patents. We test our predictions on US GM crop patent data from 1988 to 1998. The evidence supports the predictions of the theoretical model.

How Basic is (Patented) University Research? The Case of GM Crops

One of the main reasons for subsidising university research is the widespread belief that it generates proportionally more positive knowledge externalities than corporate research. Over the last two decades, however, this belief has been shaken by the increasingly aggressive patenting of university-based innovation. This perception was supported by Henderson, Jaffe and Trajtenberg (1998) who found both a sharp increase in university patenting and a decrease in the relative 'importance' of university innovation over the later part of their 1965-1992 sample. In this paper, we have compared the knowledge externalities generated by university and corporate patents related to GM crop research. Our main measure of knowledge externalities is the total number of third party cites generated by a patent. Our main result is that patented university research is not associated with greater knowledge externalities than corresponding corporate patents. If anything, corporate patents appear to generate greater numbers of net citations. This basic conclusion survives when we control for a number of variables that could affect citation counts (e.g. patent examiner effects) and when we break our sample into sub-periods. This does not imply that university patents are similar to corporate patents in every respect. We find two main differences. Firstly, there is some evidence that the shape of the distribution of citations is not identical for the two groups of patents as university patents appear to experience a more sluggish start than their corporate brethren. Secondly, even controlling quite narrowly for areas of specialisation, university patents receive a disproportionate number of cites from other university patents. These two results suggest that there are some fundamental differences in the types of knowledge flows generated by university and corporate patents.

"Vexatious"/"Sham" Litigation in EU and US Antitrust Law: A Mechanism Design Approach

In both the US and the EU, the antitrust category of “sham litigation” (in the US) or “vexatious litigation” (in the EU) enables a plaintiff, or a defendant in case this action forms part of a counterclaim, to argue that the introduction of litigation may constitute, under certain conditions, an infringement of competition law. This naturally leads to the question of what is a workable standard for establishing the existence of sham litigation, and how it is possible to distinguish between the legitimate use of the regulatory/litigation process and strategic attempts to use the process in order to restrict competition. Legal and economic literature, as well as the courts, have struggled to define operational tests enabling them to determine the boundaries of the “sham”/“vexatious” litigation antitrust category. The paper examines the intellectual underpinnings of this form of abusive/anticompetitive conduct and puts forward a “mechanism design approach” with the aim to reduce the occurrence of sham litigation

“Sham” Litigation - When Can It Arise and How Can It Be Reduced?

In both the U.S. and the EU, the antitrust category of “sham litigation” (in the U.S.) or “vexatious litigation” (in the EU) enables a plaintiff, or a defendant in case this action forms part of a counterclaim, to argue that the introduction of litigation may constitute, under certain conditions, an infringement of competition law. This naturally leads to the question of what is a workable standard for establishing the existence of sham litigation, and how it is possible to distinguish between the legitimate use of the regulatory/litigation process and strategic attempts to use the process in order to restrict competition. Legal and economic literature, as well as the courts, have struggled to define operational tests enabling them to determine the boundaries of the “sham”/“vexatious” litigation antitrust category. This article examines the intellectual underpinnings of this form of abusive/anticompetitive conduct and puts forward a “mechanism design approach” with the aim to reduce the occurrence of sham litigation

\u201cHow Basic Is (Patented) University Research? The Case of GM Crops\u201d

WP UNIVERSITY OF ESSE

Administrative delays as barriers to trade

Also available via the InternetAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(no 3007) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Project evaluation and organizational form

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(1888) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

A multi-task principal-agent approach to organizational form

Prepared by the Centre's research programme in Industrial OrganizationAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(no 2443) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Regulatory reform in the Spanish electricity industry A missed opportunity for competition

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:7755.04507(98/1) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo