renewable energy consumption and industrial production a disaggregated time frequency analysis for the u s abstract this paper aims to analyze the interaction between renewable energy consumption and industrial production for the u s over the 1981 2018 period we contribute to the existing literature by the disaggregation of renewable energy sources hydropower geothermal and biomass by the consideration of time and frequency through wavelet techniques and the time varying granger causality test recently proposed by shi et al 2018 based on monthly data wavelet results show a positive co movement between industrial production and biomass energy consumption at low frequencies meaning in the long term only the bootstrap rolling window granger causality test indicates a bi directional predictability between renewable energy consumption and industrial production in crisis and turmoil periods only these results are found to be robust to the inclusion of control variables non renewable energy consumption and crude oil prices and to the selection of the lag length for the corresponding var model

patent validation at the country level the role of fees and translation costs one feature of the european patent system that is heavily criticized nowadays is related to its complex fragmentation and the induced cost burden for applicants once a patent is granted by the epo the assignee must validate and often translate it and pay the renewal fees to keep it in force in each country in which the applicant seeks protection the objective of this paper is to assess to what extent validation and renewal fees as well as translation costs affect the validation behavior of applicants we rely on a gravity model that aims at explaining patent flows between inventor and target countries within the european patent system the results show that the size of countries their wealth and the distance between their capital cities are significant determinants of patent flows validation fees and renewal fees further affect the validation behavior of applicants translation costs seem to have an impact as well the important role played by fees suggests that the implementation of cost reducing policy interventions like the london protocol would induce a significant increase in the number of patents validated in each european country

the two faces of janus institutions policy regimes and macroeconomic performance in greece greece the two faces of janus institutions policy regimes and macroeconomic performance the clear change in policy regime in greece around 1974 offers an opportunity to assess the extent to which economic performance depends on institutional underpinning for twenty years up to 1974 greece enjoyed rapid growth high investment and low inflation during the next twenty years growth and investment collapsed and inflation became high and persistent i describe the political background to such clear institutional change and the nature of the two economic regimes the first providing coordination and commitment mechanisms to sustain adequate returns for high investment the second failing to do so the same change in political climate after 1974 raised public sector deficits and debt fuelling a trade deficit and monetary expansion entry to the ec did not cause the economic slowdown in greece but transfers from the ec did mask the underlying problem delaying necessary adjustment recent attempts to reverse greece s fortunes are in the right direction but as yet inadequate george alogoskoufis

chinese liquidity effects on the australian macroeconomy 2002 2017 abstractchina s growing importance to the australian economy has been well recognized in policy circles but remained relatively untested in formal empirical analysis this paper examines the reacti

an innovation focused roadmap for a sustainable global photovoltaic industry the solar photovoltaic pv industry has undergone a dramatic evolution over the past decade growing at an average rate of 48 percent per year to a global market size of 31 gw in 2012 and with the price of crystalline silicon pv module as low as 0 72 w in september 2013 to examine this evolution we built a comprehensive dataset from 2000 to 2012 for the pv industries in the united states china japan and germany which we used to develop a model to explain the dynamics among innovation manufacturing and market a two factor learning curve model is constructed to make explicit the effect of innovation from economies of scale the past explosive growth has resulted in an oversupply problem which is undermining the effectiveness of demand pull policies that could otherwise spur innovation to strengthen the industry we find that a policy shift is needed to balance the excitement and focus on market forces with a larger commitment to research and development funding we use this work to form a set of recommendations and a roadmap that will enable a next wave of innovation and thus sustainable growth of the pv industry into a mainstay of the global energy economy

an equilibrium model of the business cycle with household production and fiscal policy the authors estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the u s economy that includes an explicit household production sector and stochastic fiscal variables they use their estimates to investigate two issues first the authors analyze how well the model accounts for aggregate fluctuations they find that household production has a significant impact and reject a nested specification in which changes in the home production technology do not matter for market variables second the authors study the effects of some simple fiscal policy experiments and show that the model generates different predictions for the effects of tax changes than similar models without home production copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the role of fees in patent systems theory and evidence this paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems two main research questions are usually addressed the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inelastic good studies in the latter group provide grounds for both low and high application or pre grant fees and renewal or post grant fees depending on the structural context and policy objectives the paper also presents new stylized facts on patent fees of 30 patent offices worldwide it is shown that application fees are generally lower than renewal fees and renewal fees increase more than proportionally with patent age 2012 john wiley sons ltd

on passive money there are two ways in which the quantity of money may be included in a general equilibrium system as a datum whose value is fixed exogenously or as an unknown whose value is determined by the equilibrium system itself let them be called active money and passive money respectively current monetary theory uses the first approach the ricardo walraskeynes tradition in general equilibrium models is clearly of the activemoney variety this is also true of the more contemporary versions such as patinkin s well known system 1965 apart from the main stream of thought however a number of analyses exist which imply passive money the gold standard model as it is usually expounded belongs to this class the price of gold in terms of money is given while the stock of money is endogenously determined by the set of equilibrium conditions the form in which the quantity of money adapts to its equilibrium level differs according to the institutional mechanism convergence is assured through monetization and demonetization of gold in the pure goldcurrency system and through convertibility of notes into gold and vice versa in the gold standard system with paper money in either case the money supply is allowed to conform to its equilibrium volume this kind of monetary system in which the money price of a certain product or commodity is a datum and the quantity of money a dependent magnitude may be denoted in general as a commodity standard

government size and macroeconomic stability abstract we analyze the effects of government size on output variability in the context of a rbc model in which government size is parameterized by the income tax rate and the share of government purchases in output the model implies that i income taxes are destabilizing and ii for most specifications considered government purchases are stabilizing we compare those predictions with the results of simple cross country regressions using data for 22 oecd countries the estimated relationship between empirical indicators of government size and measures of gdp variability appears far stronger than the model predicts and often has the opposite sign

the u s patent system in transition policy innovation and the innovation process abstract this paper surveys the major changes in patent policy and practice that have occured in the last two decades in the u s and reviews the existing analyses by the economists that attempt to measure the impacts these changes have had on the processes of technological change it also reviews the broader theoretical and empirical literature that bears on the expected effects of changes in patent policy despite the significance of the policy changes and the wide availability of detailed data relating to patenting robust conclusions regarding the empirical consequences for technological innovation of changes in patent policy are few possible reasons for these limited results are discussed and possible avenues for future research are suggested

impact of the financial crisis on indian commodity markets structural breaks and volatility dynamics the shocks transmitted across the financial markets during the financial crisis resulted in structural changes in commodity volatility hence understanding volatility dynamics in changing scenario is vital for derivative pricing risk management and monetary policy stabilization this paper studies the impact of the financial crisis by analyzing the following aspects 1 presence of structural break regime shift in volatility by deploying markov and wavelet model during financial crisis and 2 crisis impact on volatility dynamic behavior such as persistence leverage and long memory by deploying hybrid wavelet egarch and fractional integration spot prices of 18 commodities were examined including all sub sectors of energy metals and agriculture indian commodity indices sub indices global benchmark indices and also stock indices such as sp agricultural commodities showed faster convergence to long run equilibrium while metal and energy experienced higher persistence and attracted more financial speculation the impact of the crisis on agricultural commodities was limited to internationally traded commodities such as sugar and rubber the common breaks and different volatility dynamics have been attributed to systematic risk and to idiosyncratic components respectively it was also found that during and after the crisis more than idiosyncratic risk it was systematic risk that contributed significantly to the volatility patterns of indian commodity markets

the role of commodity prices in formulating monetary policy commodity prices often provide signals about the future direction of the economy especially inflation it has been argued therefore that the information in commodity prices should be used in formulating monetary policy this paper investigates whether a systematic monetary policy response to contemporaneous commodity price shocks would have helped stabilize the postwar u s economy the authors findings suggest that responding to unexpected commodity price movements would have lowered the average rate of inflation and reduced its variability while the path of real growth would be relatively unchanged copyright 1991 by mit press

the benefits and costs of strong patent protection a contribution to the current debate abstract today s conventional wisdom is that strong patent rights are conducive to economic progress yet not long ago students of the patent system took a more nuanced position arguing that often strong patents were not necessary to induce invention and entailed significant economic costs several empirical studies have supported this position however the current advocacy invokes theories of the positive benefits of patents that were repressed in the earlier more negative analyses this essay reviews these theories and the empirical evidence that might bear on them the authors conclude that there is reason for concern that the present movement towards stronger patent protection may hinder rather than stimulate technological and economic progress

the grace period in international patent law and its effect on the timing of disclosure abstract the paper applies a novel methodology to us and epo patent data to assess how often the general grace period exception is used in the usa and the likely impact of international patent regulations that almost invariably deny such use on the pace of new disclosures in academia comparisons of average publication delays of european academic inventors show that the grace period accelerates knowledge communication and that variations are likely to depend on a lack of harmonisation of international legal systems transaction costs and the presence of a firm among patent assignees

does global liquidity drive commodity prices abstract this paper tackles the question of whether a cross sectional perspective on monetary policy is capable of explaining movements in global commodity prices in this vein we contribute to the rich literature on global liquidity in two different ways on the one hand to achieve a global series in terms of common monetary policy shocks we propose a distinction between common and idiosyncratic factors across economies as proposed by bai and ng 2004 our second innovation stems from the consideration of a markov switching vector error correction model when analyzing time varying short run dynamics having identified the long run structure which includes a proportional relationship between commodity prices and global liquidity in the first step our results indeed show that the impact of a global liquidity measure on different commodity prices is significant and varies over time one regime approximately accounts for times where commodity prices significantly adjust to disequilibria while the second regime is characterized by either a weak or no commodity price adjustment the fact that global liquidity also reacts to disequilibria in a specific regime demonstrates the two way causality between monetary policy and commodity prices

current real business cycle theories and aggregate labor market fluctuations hours worked and the return to working are weakly correlated traditionally the ability to account for this fact has been a litmus test for macroeconomic models existing real business cycle models fail this test dramatically we modify prototypical real business cycle models by allowing government consumption shocks to influence labor market dynamics this modification can in principle bring the models into closer conformity with the data our empirical results indicate that it does

determinants of patent rights a cross national study abstract this paper presents an index of patent rights for 110 countries for the period 1960 1990 the index is used to examine what factors or characteristics of economies determine how strongly patent rights will be protected the evidence does indicate that more developed economies tend to provide stronger protection but the underlying factors which influence patent protection levels are the country s level of research and development r d activity market environment and international integration which are correlated with its level of development the results qualify however that r d activity influences patent protection levels after a nation s research sector reaches a critical size an implication of this is that to raise patent protection levels in weakly protecting countries it is important to foster a significant research base in those countries and thereby create incentives for protecting patent rights

patent office in innovation policy nobody s perfect abstract the number of patent applications and bad patents issued has been rising rapidly in recent years based on this trend we study the overload problem within the patent office and its consequences on the firms r d incentives we assume that the examination process of patent applications is imperfect and that its quality is poorer under congestion depending on policy instruments such as submission fees and the toughness of the non obviousness requirement the system may result in a high r d equilibrium in which firms self select in their patent applications or in an equilibrium with low r d opportunistic patent applications and the issuance of bad patents multiple equilibria often co exist which deeply undermines the effectiveness of policy instruments we investigate the robustness of our conclusions as to how the value of patent protection is formalized taking into consideration the introduction of a penalty system for rejected patent applications as well as the role of commitment to a given patent protection policy

a survey of the economics of patent systems and procedures the last several decades have seen increases in patenting activity worldwide as well as growing issues related to patent quality in response to these quality issues a recent patent literature has emerged that investigates the behavior and incentives of patent examiners applicants and third parties in this paper we provide an overview of patent procedures patent systems and a survey of the new economic literature on patent systems both theoretical and empirical papers are considered policy implications coming from this literature are presented

a quality index for patent systems abstract this paper presents a quality index for patent systems the index is composed of nine operational design components that shape the transparency and stringency of patent systems and affect the extent to which they comply with patentability conditions seven components are related to rules and regulations e g grace period opposition process and continuation in parts while two components measure patent offices resource allocation policy i e workload per examiner and incentives the index is computed for 32 national patent systems and displays a high degree of heterogeneity across countries cross sectional quantitative analyses suggest that the demand for patent rights is lower in patent systems with a higher quality index controlling for research efforts patent fees and the strength of enforcement mechanisms these results have important policy and research metrics implications

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

global oil prices macroeconomic fundamentals and china s commodity sector comovements abstract this paper investigates the common movements of commodity sectors in china as well as the economic underpinnings of the comovements we employ a bayesian dynamic latent factor model to disentangle the common and idiosyncratic sector specific factors of the prices of a group of china s commodity sectors petrochemicals grains energy non ferrous metals oils fats and softs the results indicate that the common factor accounts for a significant portion of the fluctuations of china s commodity sectors providing evidence of the strong commodity sector comovements in china we further use a var model to link the common movements across china s commodity sectors to the underlying determinants including global oil price shocks and domestic macroeconomic fluctuations we find that the global oil price shocks have strong effects on the common movements across commodity sectors in china in addition to its domestic macroeconomic fluctuations at long horizons however at short horizons the common movements across commodity sectors in china respond more strongly to the global oil shocks than to its domestic macroeconomic fluctuations

explaining saving investment correlations national saving and investment rates are highly positively correlated in virtually all countries this is puzzling as it apparently implies a low degree of international capital mobility this paper shows that the observed positive correlation between national saving and investment rates arises naturally within a quantitatively restricted equilibrium model with perfect mobility of financial and physical capital the model is consistent with the fact that saving investment correlations are larger for larger countries but are still substantial for small countries further the model is consistent with the finding that current account deficits tend to be associated with investment booms copyright 1993 by american economic association

a non recursive solution for the linear rational expectations model this paper summarizes two new results on the solution of linear rational expectations models arising from optimizing behavior the first result concerns the development of conditions under which the general solution of the euler equation associated with the linear rational expectations lre model can be obtained by finding the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of its characteristic matrix polynomial 1 the second result concerns the development of conditions under which the general solution of the euler equation associated with the lre model becomes the globally asymptotically stable particular solution of that equation the conditions of these two results take the form of restrictions on the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of the characteristic matrix polynomial associated with the euler equation of the lre model the usefulness of these results stems primarily from two facts first these results may be combined with the generaiized wiener kolmogorov prediction formulae to obtain a non recursive as dosed as possible to a closed form solution to the lre model 2 3 second this solution is established under less restrictive conditions than the recursive solution of hansen and sargent

a small open economy model with transaction costs in foreign capital abstract in this paper we develop a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model for a small open economy in the real business cycle modeling tradition household preferences depend on private and public consumption and leisure production technology depends on public capital government finances its investment consumption and transfer payments by means of a proportional income tax rate households buy and sell foreign assets in an international capital market with transaction costs and also receive transfer payments from abroad we calibrate the model for the greek economy the volatility persistence and co movement properties of the business cycle component of the data generated by the model are broadly consistent with the actual behavior of the corresponding actual data we use the model to investigate the response of major macroeconomic variables to temporary and permanent changes in government policy variables foreign transfers and the rate on return of foreign assets we find that increasing government consumption and domestic transfers financed through distorting taxation lowers capital labor in most cases and output while it increases foreign asset holdings both in the short and the long run increasing government investment financed by distorting taxation eventually increases capital and output and decreases labor finally transfers from abroad decrease capital labor and output while they increase consumption

the macroeconomic effects of distortionary taxation abstract prescott 1986 estimates that technology shocks account for 75 of the fluctuations in the postwar u s economy this paper reestimates the contribution of technological change for a standard business cycle model that includes a public sector and fiscal disturbances i find that a significant fraction of the variance of aggregate consumption investment output capital stock and hours of work can be explained by disturbances in labor and capital tax rates and government consumption i also use the model to quantify the welfare costs of capital and labor taxation for both the time series and welfare calculations maximum likelihood estimates of taste technology and policy parameters are used

effects of global liquidity on commodity and food prices summary this article investigates the relationship between global liquidity and commodity and food prices applying a global cointegrated vector autoregressive model we use different measures of global liquidity and various indices of commodity and food prices for the period 1980 2011 our results support the hypothesis that there is a positive long run relation between global liquidity and the development of food and commodity prices and that food and commodity prices adjust significantly to this cointegrating relation global liquidity in contrast does not adjust it drives the relationship

is there a role for commodity prices in the design of monetary policy some empirical the consumer price index in the united states follows a non trend stationary stochastic process that describes the index as drifting randomly upward without bound monetarists have long pointed to similar properties in the time series of monetary aggregates as the source of this incipient inflation their solution to this problem is close adherence by the central bank to targets for a monetary or reserve aggregate that correspond to slow and steady monetary growth with any periods of excessive monetary growth subsequently offset this would produce monetary series that are trend stationary if the demand for money is reasonably stable price series would also become trend stationary and for properly chosen targets the price level would be bounded with a mean inflation rate of zero

constructing historical euro zone data existing methods of reconstructing historical euro zone data by aggregation of the individual countries aggregate data raises numerous difficulties especially due to past exchange rate changes the approach proposed here is designed to avoid such distortions and aggregate exactly when exchange rates are fixed we first compute growth rates within states aggregate these then cumulate this euro zone growth rate to obtain the aggregated levels variables the aggregate of the implicit deflator plice index coincides with the implicit deflator of our aggregate nominal and real data we apply the method to euro zone m3 gdp and prices over the previous two decades 1 background with the introduction on 31 december 1998 of the irrevocably fixed euro exchange rates eleven countries of the european union entered a new monetary union from that date onwards monetary policy for these countries is set by the newly formed european central bank ecb the governing council of the ecb bases its monetary policy on medium term assumptions regarding real gdp growth and the trend decline in the velocity of circulation of m3 ecb 1999a p 40 therefore the construction of historical data for aggregate m3 and gdp for the euro zone is of practical relevance to policy makers in addition any econometric model for euro zone countries requires such historical data this paper describes an approach to doing so from the aggregate data of the individual member states a number of previous reconstructions are noted but as these have important drawbacks an approach related to that in t6rnqvist 1936 is proposed and its properties are discussed although there have been many important contributions to index number theory see section 4 few are directly relevant to the problem confronted here where we wish to use the national aggregates from member states not the individual item data usually input into index calculations to construct a euro zone aggregate moreover the inherently non stationary nature of those national aggregates both from unit roots inducing integrated time series

the dynamics of a small open economy in response to monetary fiscal and productivity shocks abstract this paper evaluates empirically the relative importance of monetary and fiscal versus technology shocks in an open economy characterized by perfect international capital mobility the variance covariance matrix of these shocks is estimated a stochastic model is used to perform numerical simulations the results show that persistent shocks to productivity can reproduce several empirical regularities including the puzzling high correlation between national saving and investment remarkably well and that monetary and fiscal shocks play a minor role

what is behind the recent surge in patenting abstract we investigate the cause of an unprecedented surge of us patenting over the past decade conventional wisdom points to the establishment of the court of appeals of the federal circuit by congress in 1982 we examine whether this institutional change which has benefited patent holders explains the burst in us patenting using both international and domestic data on patent applications and awards we conclude that the evidence is not favorable to the conventional view instead it appears that the jump in patenting reflects an increase in us innovation spurred by changes in the management of research

comparisons of business cycles in the ec idiosyncracies and regularities annual data since 1960 and the real business cycle model as a guidance the evidence suggests that there are remarkable similarities between the business cycle pattern of these countries despite significant differences in the patterns of fiscal and monetary policies and the terms of trade we take this evidence to suggest that the type of shocks and the propagation mechanism is fairly similar across the ec countries hence the process of european integration under a set of uniform institutions and policies should not be a problem as far as the business cycle is concerned

production growth and business cycles ii new directions abstract this paper outlines new directions for investigations of real business cycle models consideration of stochastic growth of exogenous and endogenous forms analysis of suboptimal outcomes arising due to externalities of distorting taxes and implications of labor market heterogeneity

the quality factor in patent systems this article develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services in three major patent systems quality is defined as the extent to which patent systems comply with the patentability conditions in a transparent way the methodology consists of a two layer analytical framework encompassing legal standards ls and their operational design od which includes several interdependent components that affect the stringency and transparency of the filtering process the comparison of patent systems in europe japan and the united states shows that their operational designs differ substantially the european system provides higher quality and more expensive examination services than the united states one while the japanese patent system is in an intermediate position the results illustrate that different system designs lead to different outcomes in terms of backlogs patent propensity and the number of dubious patent rights in force in this respect these findings i provide an empirical validation of the conjecture of a vicious cycle linking the quality of examination and demand for patents and ii highlight the need for a multifaceted convergence of patent systems before mutual recognition is put in place the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved

financial liquidity geopolitics and oil prices abstract this paper aims simultaneously to study the global dynamic relationship of oil prices financial liquidity and geopolitical risk on the one hand and the economic performance of oil exports dependent economies on the other global and country specific dynamics are studied together in a global vector autoregression gvar model that allows different lag structures for different variables in different countries global impulse response functions from the estimated model suggest that new waves of high oil prices are unlikely despite the likely continuation of high global financial liquidity and heightened geopolitical risk which had driven earlier episodes of very high oil prices with oil remaining at modest to low prices by recent historical standards we study the prospects for economic growth in oil export dependent economies through dramatic increases in domestic investment as planned under visions 2030 of some arab countries and conclude that unfortunately success is unlikely

methodological and empirical issues in real business cycle theory abstract in this paper we argue that the major impact of the rbc literature has been to propose a new methodology for macroeconomics this methodology is distinguished first by the importance it attributes to the empirical description of the phenomena to be explained and second by the use of this description in conjunction with quantitative theorizing i e the construction of computable general equilibrium models whose characteristic statistics match those of the data in accordance with this approach we first report on the current state of knowledge concerning business cycle regularities and conclude that additional empirical effort is called for in order to arrive at the appropriate basis for theorizing we then examine the performance of existing models and evaluate the case for integrating monetary factors and demand shocks into them lastly we review the recent efforts to explain the employment variability puzzle and argue that the search for a solution naturally leads to the incorporation of significant non walrasian features into the rbc framework

on the exposure of the bric countries to global economic shocks the financial crisis led to a deep recession in many industrial countries while large emerging countries recovered relatively quickly from the financial crisis their performance deteriorated in the last years despite the modest recovery in advanced economies the higher divergence of business cycles is closely linked to the chinese transformation during the crisis the chinese fiscal stimulus prevented a decline in gdp growth not only in that country but also in resource rich economies the chinese shift to consumption driven growth led to a decline in commodity demand and the environment became more challenging for many emerging markets this view is supported by bayesian vars specified for the bric brazil russia india and china countries the results reveal a strong impact of international variables on gdp growth in contrast to the other countries china plays a crucial role in determining global trade and oil prices hence the change in the chinese growth strategy puts additional reform pressure on countries with abundant natural resources

on the optimality of the patent renewal system the patent system is mainly a renewal system the patent life is chosen by the patentee in return for fees i ask whether such a system can be justified by asymmetric information on costs and benefits of research in such a model i show that renewal mechanisms possibly with subsidies are equivalent to direct revelation mechanisms and therefore cannot be improved on regardless of the objective function under plausible circumstances patents should have a uniform life rather than varying in length as typically occurs under a renewal system

pioneering inventors or thicket builders which u s firms use continuations in patenting why do firms use continuations in the prosecution of their patents motivated by the widespread use of continuations by u s firms and the prominence of this procedure in u s patent policy debates we investigate the influence of corporate and patent characteristics on the use of continuations we employ novel data on applicants and their filings of three types of continuations the continuation application cap the continuations in part cip and divisions during 1981 2000 to distinguish among the motives for continuing patents we find that cips are disproportionately filed by research and development intensive firms that patent heavily and that these continuations are more common in chemical and biological technologies patents issuing from cips cover relatively important inventions and their use appears consistent with a strategy of protecting pioneering inventions in contrast caps and divisions are associated with less important patents assigned to capital intensive firms particularly in computer and semiconductor fields and appear to be used in defensive patenting strategies we analyze the effects of the 1995 change in patent term and find that the act reduced continuations overall and shifted the output of continuations toward less important patents

university patenting and its effects on academic research the emerging european evidence this paper surveys the existing fragmentary data on the growth of university owned patents and university invented patents in europe we find evidence that university patenting is growing but this phenomenon remains heterogeneous across countries and disciplines we found some evidence that university licensing is not profitable for most universities although some do succeed in attracting substantial additional revenues this might be due to the fact that patents and publications tend to go hand in hand in a dynamic setting however we fear that the increase in university patenting exacerbates differences across universities in terms of financial resources and research outcome

how strong are weak patents economists usually conceive of patents as property rights that prevent others from practicing the patenting technology unless they first obtain a license from the patent holder even for ironclad patents i e for patents that are certain to be valid the existing literature has shown that the analysis of equilibrium licensing contracts is surprising subtle and complex 1 for example the analysis is quite different depending upon whether one firm s licensing contract is observable to the other firms likewise equilibrium outcomes are quite different if royalties must be linear than in the case where two part tariffs and other non linear royalties are permitted in that literature a downstream firm that refuses to sign a contract with the upstream supplier either exits the industry in the case that the upstream supplier controls an essential input or must rely on more costly inputs in the case of a non essential input in other words the downstream firm s threat point is to use some backstop technology in practice however patents are issued after a brief examination by the patent office to see if they meet the statutory requirements for novelty and non obviousness mounting evidence indicates that many weak patents i e patents unlikely to be found valid if challenged in court are issued by the u s patent and trademark office uspto 2 some observers view this with great alarm arguing that uspto is handing out undeserved monopolies others by contrast have suggested that these weak patents are of little concern because they will have little commercial impact because they will be licensed at commensurately low royalty rates or not enforced at all we study the commercial impact of weak patents more precisely we define a patent s strength as the probability that it will be found valid if challenged in court and we examine the relationship between a patent s strength and the royalties that it can command the distinctive

the patent paradox revisited an empirical study of patenting in the u s semiconductor industry 1979 1995 we examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to r d yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid1980s we explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the patenting behavior of 95 u s semiconductor firms during 1979 1995 the results suggest that the 1980s strengthening of u s patent rights spawned patent portfolio races among capital intensive firms but it also facilitated entry by specialized design firms

legal institutions and fragile financial markets abstract this study investigates equity liquidity variation with a funding constraint across 38 countries and examines whether the effectiveness of a country s legal institutions is systematically related to cross country differences in fragile equity liquidity our results show that firms from countries with more extensive disclosure requirements tend to have lower liquidity shocks due to funding constraints leading to higher firm value this effect is stronger for ex ante disclosures especially for countries with a high level of openness and market volatility our empirical results are robust to the 2sls regression model the random effect regression model the alternative measure of fragile equity liquidity and the alternative measure of disclosure and enforcement variables our study provides a better understanding of the effect of information environments amidst periods of funding constraint

commodity dynamics a sparse multi class approach abstract the correct understanding of commodity price dynamics can bring relevant improvements in terms of policy formulation both for developing and developed countries agricultural metal and energy commodity prices might depend on each other although we expect few important effects among the total number of possible ones some price effects among different commodities might still be substantial moreover the increasing integration of the world economy suggests that these effects should be comparable for different markets this paper introduces a sparse estimator of the multi class vector autoregressive model to detect common price effects between a large number of commodities for different markets or investment portfolios in a first application we consider agricultural metal and energy commodities for three different markets we show a large prevalence of effects involving metal commodities in the chinese and indian markets and the existence of asymmetric price effects in a second application we analyze commodity prices for five different investment portfolios and highlight the existence of important effects from energy to agricultural commodities the relevance of biofuels is hereby confirmed overall we find stronger similarities in commodity price effects among portfolios than among markets

the influence of biofuels economic and financial factors on daily returns of commodity futures prices abstract biofuels production has experienced rapid growth worldwide as one of the several strategies to promote green energy economies indeed climate change mitigation and energy security have been frequent rationales behind biofuel policies but biofuels production could generate negative impacts such as additional demand for feedstocks and therefore for land on which to grow them with a consequent increase in food commodity prices in this context this paper examines the effect of biofuels and other economic and financial factors on daily returns of a group of commodity futures prices using generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch family models in univariate and multivariate settings the results show that a complex of drivers are relevant in explaining commodity futures returns more precisely the standard and poor s s p 500 positively affects commodity markets while the us euro exchange rate brings about a decline in commodity returns it turns out in addition that energy market returns are significant in explaining commodity returns on a daily basis while monetary liquidity is not this would imply that biofuel policy should be carefully monitored in order to avoid excessive first generation subsidization which would trigger a fuel vs food conflict

how broad should the scope of patent protection be i explore the trade off between a patent s length that is its lifetime and its width that is its scope of coverage a wider patent generally reduces the distortion of consumers choices between the patented brand of the product and unpatented lower priced varieties sold by competitors but also permits higher prices which increase relative to profits the deadweight losses from consumers switching consumption out of the product class i show under what conditions infinitely lived but very narrowly focused patents are the socially efficient way to reward innovation and under what conditions very short lived but very broad patents are optimal

relative prices and money a vector autoregression on brazilian data recent data on brazilian agricultural prices industrial prices and money supply are analyzed in a vector autoregression the empirical findings show strong one way granger type causality from money supply to agricultural prices while feedback is observed between industrial prices and money supply under the usual monetarist ordering of contemporaneous innovation covariance agricultural prices do not adjust faster than industrial prices to a shock in the money supply

fiscal policy in general equilibrium this paper studies four classic fiscal policy experiments within a quantitatively restricted neoclassical model the authors main findings are as follows 1 permanent changes in government purchases can lead to short run and long run output multipliers that exceed one 2 permanent changes in government purchases induce larger effects than temporary changes 3 the financing decision is quantitatively more important than the resource cost of changes in government purchases and 4 public investment has dramatic effects on private output and investment these findings stem from important dynamic interactions of capital and labor absent in earlier equilibrium analyses of fiscal policy copyright 1993 by american economic association

novelty and disclosure in patent law the stringency of the novelty requirement in patent law affects the pace of innovation because it affects the amount of technical information that is disclosed among firms it also affects ex ante profitability of research we compare weak and strong novelty requirements from the standpoint of social efficiency we ask how our answer depends on the rule that determines which firm gets a patent when two firms have patents pending on the same technology the possible rules are first to invent which applies in the u s and first to file which applies everywhere else

international protection of intellectual property we study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy we consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size and in their capacities for innovation after describing the determination of national patent policies in a non cooperative regime of patent protection we ask why is intellectual property better protected in the north than in the south we also study international patent agreements by deriving the properties of an efficient global regime of patent protection and asking whether harmonization of patent policies is necessary or sufficient for global efficiency jel o34 f13 during the 1980 s and early 1990 s the united states and several european countries expressed strong dissatisfaction with what they deemed to be inadequate protection of intellectual property in many developing countries the developed countries made the upgrading of intellectual property rights iprs one of their highest priorities for the uruguay round of trade talks their efforts bore fruit in the agreement on traderelated aspects of intellectual property rights trips which was approved as part of the final act of the uruguay round trips establishes minimum standards of protection for several categories of intellectual property for example in the area of new technology it essentially harmonizes

monetary policy rules and the indicator properties of asset prices abstract we investigate relationships between asset prices and inflation in a modern keynesian model in which monetary policy controls inflation by manipulating the federal funds rate the indicator properties of asset prices are quite sensitive to the monetary policy rule including the asset prices themselves in the reaction function can invert the sense of the indicator properties targeting the asset prices is tantamount to targeting the real interest rate when all of the weight in the reaction function is placed on asset prices the real rate converges so rapidly that policy loses control of inflation

global factors uncertainty weather conditions and energy prices on the drivers of the duration of commodity price cycle phases abstract we investigate the role of global factors in explaining the length of commodity price cycle phases using a continuous time weibull duration model and data for a panel of 33 countries over the period 1980q1 2015q4 we find evidence of increasing constant positive duration dependence for commodity price booms and busts normal time spells global macroeconomic conditions in particular inflation economic policy uncertainty and monetary policy actions significantly affect the duration of all commodity price cycle phases global environmental conditions also impact the duration of commodity price booms with a rise in average temperature rainfall increasing reducing their length a rise in the number of military conflicts around the globe is associated with shorter booms and busts finally we find that a rise in oil prices is linked with longer booms and shorter busts

expectations and commodity price dynamics the overshooting model monetary policy has important effects on agricultural commodity prices because though they are flexible other goods prices are sticky this paper formalizes the argument by applying the dornbusch overshooting model a decline in the nominal money supply is a decline in the real money supply in the short run it raises the real interest rate which depresses real commodity prices they overshoot their new equilibrium in order to generate an expectation of future appreciation sufficient to offset the higher interest rate these real effects which vanish in the long run also result from a decline in the money growth rate

stochastic fiscal policy and the swedish business cycle in this paper we show that fluctuations in distortive taxes can account for some of the key features of the swedish post war business cycle the empirical fit of a simple stochastic growth model is significantly improved when it is amended to include imperfectly predictable fluctuations in payroll taxes consumption taxes and government consumption indeed using the simulated method of moments smm we find that for large sets of conventional moments models with stochastic fiscal policy cannot be statistically rejected whereas a model without it is always rejected

the workweek of capital and its cyclical implications abstract the neoclassical growth model studied in the kydland and prescott time to build paper is modified to permit the capital utilization rate to vary the effect of this modification is to increase the amplitude of the aggregate fluctuations predicted by theory as the equilibrium response to technological shocks if following solow the changes in output not accounted for by changes in the labor and tangible capital inputs are interpreted as being the technology shocks the statistical properties of the fluctuations in the postwar united states economy are close in magnitude and nature to those predicted by theory

international real business cycles we ask whether a two country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles with this question in mind we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data the most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries in the data outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions in the model we see the opposite

commodity prices and bric and g3 liquidity a sfavec approach this paper investigates the influence of liquidity in the major developed and major developing economies on commodity prices liquidity is taken to be m2 a novel finding is that unanticipated increases in the bric countries liquidity is associated with significant and persistent increases in commodity prices that are much larger than the effect of unanticipated increases in g3 liquidity and the difference increases over time over 1999 2012 bric liquidity is strongly linked with global energy prices and global real activity whereas g3 liquidity is not the impact of bric liquidity on mineral and metal prices is twice as large as that of g3 liquidity granger casualty goes from liquidity to commodity prices bric and g3 liquidity and commodity prices are cointegrated bric and g3 liquidity and global output and global prices are cointegrated we construct a structural factor augmented error correction sfavec model

public goods merit goods and the relation between private and government consumption in this paper we investigate the relation between public and private consumption by constructing a general government spending data set by function for 12 european countries in particular we split government consumption into two categories the 1rst category public goods includes defence public order and justice the second category merit goods includes health education and other services that could have been provided privately equations from a relatively general permanent income model are estimated by gmm the estimates are fairly robust in showing that public goods substitute while merit goods complement private consumption however the relation between merit goods and private goods turns out to be stronger than that between public goods and private goods thus in the aggregate government and private consumption are complements c

the development trinity how regional integration impacts growth inequality and poverty developing countries today have become more active participants in regional trade agreements this raises questions about how the benefits of integration are distributed and the extent to which lower income countries are able to capture development gains historically such impacts have been difficult to identify with precision this paper seeks to address this gap by empirically analysing the impact of regional integration on development particularly the effects on growth and welfare using both bilateral and regional integration measures we show that the ability to capture gains from integration varies across developing country regional groups with developing asia benefiting on par with developed countries the findings in the paper indicate that trade and trade policy play an important role in reducing inequality and poverty in developing countries it also shows that regionalism can function as a channel to make multilateralism a more adept way of addressing national challenges