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Enrico Santarelli (Università di Bologna)

28 March 2019 @ 13:00

 

  • Past event

Details

Date:
28 March 2019
Time:
13:00
Event Category:
Academic Events

“Intellectual Property Right Protection and Productivity: Constitutional vs. Ordinary Laws?”

at Department of Economics and Statistics S. Cognetti de Martiis

Abstract
Focusing on 22 OECD countries we estimate the impact of constitutional provisions and lower-rank norms aimed at protecting intellectual property rights (IPRs) on labor productivity at industry level. Our analysis allows us to answer the following questions: Are IPRs more likely to be enforced if they are envisaged in the constitution rather than provided for in ordinary legislation? And if constitutional protection implies an accrued defense or enforcement of those principle, is this difference relevant enough to translate into a higher impact on firms’ outcome? Our findings show that a) both constitutional provisions and lower-rank norms protecting IPRs positively affect labor productivity in those sectors where R&D dependence is higher; b) constitutional provisions and lower-rank norms are substitutes; (c) in those countries where IPRs are protected by constitutional norms, lower-rank norms have no significant impact on the labor productivity differential between R&D high and low dependent industries. By using IV techniques and controlling for a full set of year-, industry- and country fixed effects (and their interactions), we prove that these results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variable or reverse causality.