In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms' decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow down,...

The FTC completed its antitrust investigation of Google in 2013 and, finding no evidence of antitrust violations, decided not to bring an enforcement action against the company. Although the FTC has concluded its investigation, Google’s competitors and critics, unhappy with the outcome,...

Online advertising is what funds free online content. Since its birth in the 1990’s, it has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry. At the core of this industry lies the ability to identify and track users through various technical means, such as web cookies. Online tracking for...

Open climate and green finance issues concern the lack of a comprehensive taxonomy of green and brown assets and the uncertainty over the substantial advantage in investing in green projects (e.g., greenium). Barriers to environmental-related investments boil-down to the lack of a stable climate...

Technology is profoundly reshaping international and domestic monetary and payment systems. Catalysts include the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, the announcement of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency proposal and China’s announcement of its Digital Yuan, both in 2019, and COVID-19 in 2020. The...

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...

There are four areas of conflict of interest between the goals of democratically elected representatives in promoting regional technological innovation, and the goals of the senior managers of global corporations. These four conflicts involve:1. a conflict over information flows between...

This paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on pharmaceutical innovations for twenty-six countries that established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978-2002. Controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling techniques to establish two proper comparison sets among...

Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may counter this and even cause an economic growth explosion. In this paper, we critically...