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Project

The Economics of Innovation and IP: Empirical Evidence from Belgium

This thesis aims find new empirical evidence regarding the early stylized fact that: better ‘technological opportunities’ (cfr. Sherer, 1967) and ‘appropriability conditions’ (cfr. Arrow, 1962) lead to larger R&D investment incentives and more innovation. Rather than gather direct empirical proof on the matter, the results presented in this thesis indicate alternative pathways leading to better incentives for innovation. By taking a renewed look at the facts through a modern empirical lens I aim to contribute to the ongoing debate concerning incentives for R&D and innovation. The effect of openness on firms’ ability to seize ‘technological opportunities’ has recently caught a lot of attention in the open innovation literature (Chesbrough, 2003). As such, the first chapter of this thesis examines how external knowledge acquisition could facilitate the seizing of technological opportunities and influence ‘appropriability conditions’ by speeding-up the innovation process. The effect of filing patents on innovation is of equal contemporaneous importance but has recently been the subject of controversy (Boldrine & Levin, 2013), and is therefore required to be re-examined. This thesis’ second chapter investigates to which extent firms that are implementing their acquired knowledge into innovative solutions might get hit by adverse events, such as imitation and (involuntary) diffusion of knowledge, and to which extent patents do or do not alleviate the issue. IP enforcement and litigation can be considered as another alternative way to enable or maintain appropriability of innovations. Given the recent rise in IP litigation cases (Bessen and Meurer, 2005) and the relative lack of contemporaneous firm level evidence on the matter, in the third chapter I examine the determinants of IP litigation as at the firm level where I focus on firms’ market value at stake in their disputes. 

Date:1 Oct 2012 →  29 Aug 2018
Keywords:Economics of Innovation, Intellectual Property, Applied Econometrics
Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism
Project type:PhD project