Why are some uncompetitive industry sectors so effective in lobbying for greater protection and support? This paper attempts to explain the lobbying success of these industries in terms of the strategic role of investment in technology as a credible commitment device. By eschewing potentially profitable investment opportunities firms credibly signal to the government that the cost of a tariff r...

We extend the protection for sale framework by modelling non tariff barriers. Explicitly introducing partial rent capturing leads to a testable specification that bridges the gap between the theoretical Grossman and Helpman (1994) model and its empirical implementation, where coverage ratios have been used to measure protection. Our econometric analysis supports the augmented specification and ...

We investigate empirically how the Japanese patent system has affected postwar growth in Japanese total factor productivity. The system has been criticized for several reasons, including that it encourages numerous filings of narrow claims that build incrementally on fundamental technologies developed by domestic and foreign inventors. Stated in different terms, the system was designed to promo...

Using the methodology developed in Kehoe and Ruhl (2013), I measure the change in the extensive, or new goods, margin of trade between Austria and the ten new entrants to the European Union in 2004. On average, the new goods account for 56% of the bilateral trade flow after enlargement. A time series measure shows growth in the new goods margin coincides with the period surrounding the 2004 enl...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that exclusive owners of an advanced technology are always better off when producing as a monopolist than when competing against another firm. Competition against a less efficient firm weakens the power that a host country can exert on the incumbent in the form of its tariff policy. We show that this gives a motive for a monopolist to license its te...

The empirical relationship between trade protection and economic growth is surprisingly fragile, as shown in a number of other papers. After demonstrating this empirical sensitivity, we address one possible explanation for these findings: that the relationship is nonlinear. Following the endogenous growth literature, we test for the possibility that the relationship between trade barriers and g...

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 capacity for innovation. After describing the determination of national patent policies in a noncooperative regime of patent protection, we ask, “Why is intellectual property better...

I consider the implications of recent research for R&D policy in developing countries. Typical new growth models, which assume free entry and no strategic behaviour by R&D producers, are less appropriate for policy guidance than strategic oligopoly models. But the latter have ambiguous implications for targeted R&D subsidies, and caution against the anti-competitive effects of research joint ve...

A two-count ry, twōrm model has been developed to study equilibrium lobbying posit ions in intra-industry trade under cost uncertainty. A ̄rm chooses either a protect ionist posit ion or a free-t rader posit ion. The model predicts that taking the free-t rader (protect ionist) lobbying posit ion is an e± cient (ine± cient) ̄rm's dominant strategy. In addit ion, for any lobbying posit ion taken ...