Traditionally patents are seen as the gold standard for intellectual property protection. But, in line with empirical findings that secrecy is considered more important for appropriating returns, recent theories predict that firms keep their most important inventions secret. This article...

Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores its possible dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may outweigh the static losses which...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In "Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property", Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

Big companies and small innovation factories possess different advantages in a patent contest. While large firms typically have a better access to product markets, small firms often have a superior R&D efficiency. In this paper I model a patent contest with asymmetric firms. In a pre-contest...

We investigate the impact of incremental trade liberalization in a dynamic model of endogenous growth with heterogeneous firms and costly trade. Growth originates from horizontal specialization and the steady state productivity growth rate is positive. Innovations require costly R&D and are...

This paper develops an endogenous growth model based on the idea of new combinations of input factors as a growth mechanism. The model integrates the idea of several technologies used simultaneously in producing final output. Innovations are of the horizontal and vertical type and in addition of...

Both mergers and innovation are central elements of a firm s competitive strategy. However, model-theoretical analysis of the merger-innovation link is sparse. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of mergers on innovative activities and product market competition in the context of...

The question this paper addresses is how the market structure evolves due to innovative activities when firms' level of technological competence is valuable for more than one project. The focus of the work is the analysis of the effect of learning-by-doing and organizational forgetting in R&D on...

The most fundamental proposition about growth and competition is that there is a tradeoff between static welfare and long-term growth. This paper reconsiders this basic proposition in an increasing product variety endogenous growth model with competitive markets for "old" innovative products and...

Non-renewable resources are an obstacle for positive long run growth if they are essential for production, households solve an intertemporal Ramsey problem and population is growing. Modern growth models predict that growth is positively related to growth in production factors. Hence, there are...