Biological innovations in agriculture did not enjoy protection by formal intellectual property rights (IPRs) for a long time, but the recent trend has been one of considerable broadening and strengthening of these rights. We document the nature of these IPRs and their evolution, and provide an assessment of their impacts on innovation. We integrate elements of the institutional history of plant...

This paper investigates the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in shaping the GSM industry. This industry is an example of a high-tech industry in which standards play a large role. In the process of designing the GSM standard, a lot of attention has been given to IPRs, mainly to avoid a situation in which a single IPR holder could hamper or even totally block the development of the st...

This article focuses on the interaction between intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes and committee-based standards development organisations (SDOs) in terms of the commodification of knowledge. IPRs and SDOs are institutions that are designed to codify technical knowledge with quite different purposes though. The resulting documents describe a private right (patent) or a public good (a s...

We build a multi-sectoral North–South trade model to analyze international intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. By comparing the Nash equilibrium IPR protection standard of the South (the developing countries) with that of the North (the developed countries), we find that the former is naturally weaker than the latter. Moreover, we show that both regions can gain from an agreement tha...