Imagine—you’ve just been born, and your future looks bleak. After an all-too brief infancy when you’ll be cared for and fed, you’ll be forced into child labour, cleaning a dark and crowded home and caring for your many siblings. You’ll be subsequently put on guard duty to defend your home against vicious intruders. If you survive, you’ll spend the rest of your days searching for tiny bits of fo...

This paper examines how technology transfer within U. S. multinational firms changes in response to a series of IPR reforms undertaken by sixteen countries over the 1982–1999 period. Analysis of detailed firm-level data reveals that royalty payments for technology transferred to affiliates increase at the time of reforms, as do affiliate R&D expenditures and total levels of foreign patent appli...

SYNOPSIS: The rise of intangible assets in size and contribution to corporate growth over the past quarter century was accompanied by a steep increase in the rate and scope of patenting. Consequently, many patent-rich companies, particularly in the science-based and high-tech industries, are extensively engaged in the licensing and sale of patents. We examine various valuation and disclosure as...

This paper examines the changes of royalty terms of technology import contracts of Japan in 1980s and 1990s, based on the sector-level panel data. Major findings are the following: (1) The share of high royalty contracts increased significantly in 1980s and 1990s, which, however, mainly reflected the change of the composition of imported technologies, especially the increasing share of software...

This paper revisits the standard analysis of licensing a cost reducing innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines elements of a license auction with royalty licensing by granting the losers of the auction the option to sign a royalty contract. The optimal new mechanism eliminates the losses from exclusionary licensing without reducing bid...