Essays on the economics of R&D and intellectual property strategies

Chapter 1. Introduction. 1. Thesis overview and contributions . The dissertation is a collection of two essays presenting both theoretical and empirical contributions in the field of the economics of R&D incentives. The common theme of the essays is the well known problem of limited appropriability of the output of inventive activities.; The thesis improves our understanding of the relationship between appropriability, knowledge spillovers and R&D and the role of patent protection in stimulating R&D and innovation both from a theoretical and empirical point of view.; 1.1 The first essay. In the first essay I present a theoretical model of strategic cost-reducing R&D investments in oligopolistic industries with heterogeneous competitors, where firms differ in their ability to both generate process innovations and absorb knowledge spillovers from rivals.; The main contribution of the first essay is mainly theoretical---in particular with regard to the literature on appropriability and R&D---by showing that the relative composition of the industry in terms of innovators and "pure" imitators is a critical industry level characteristic conditioning the effect of spillovers on R&D.; A second and related contribution relates to the analytical clarification of the distinction between appropriability and spillovers.; 1.2. The second essay. The main objective of the second essay is to empirically evaluate the R&D incentive effect of one of the major legal intellectual property protection instruments employed to strengthen the appropriability of R&D investments, namely patent protection.; The rationale for patents protection as well as the conventional wisdom is that patents provide legal rights to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention in exchange for information disclosure of its technical details.; In this paper we focus on only one component of the impact of patenting on R&D. In particular, we first define the patent premium as the additional rents due to patent protection relative to a case without a patent. We then measure the magnitude of such a premium and analyze the impact on R&D and the production of innovations of increasing the premium. What is the responsiveness of R&D and innovation of increasing the net payoff from patenting? Does the effect varies across industries?; We try to answer these questions by estimating a structural econometric model at the firm level where the decision to patent, the amount of R&D investments and the production of innovations are endogenously determined. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...