产业特性与专利联盟经济效率

由互补性专利形成的专利联盟能够克服“专利丛林”问题、提高纵向产业链经济效率,这一结论是对专利联盟的一般共识。以生物技术产业为例,从产业特性角度,分析在存在溢出效应和产品差异化的情况下,由互补性专利组成的专利联盟经济效率问题。研究发现,当专利联盟的形成导致溢出效应很大且最终产品近似可替代时,由互补性专利组成的专利联盟会降低社会总福利水平,这为专利联盟的反垄断规制审查提供了一种新的理论见解。     

产品架构视角下专利池治理机制

随着技术构成的日益复杂和市场竞争的愈发激烈，专利池在促进专利资源整合、技术创新和行业发展中越来越重要，对专利池治理机制进行研究有助于我国专利池成功组建。基于产品架构理论新视角，依据专利性质与功能结构，将专利池划分为两种类型：模块化专利池和集块化专利池。分别选取GSM技术标准专利池和美国航空专利池两个典型专利池作为案例研究对象，阐释产品架构视角下专利池构建、运行和治理全过程。最后，针对不同类型专利池提出差异化治理机制，为专利池的灵活构建及顺利运行提供相关借鉴与政策建议。     

专利池重复联盟能否减少合作伙伴间专利诉讼

专利池内企业存在合作竞争现象,专利池重复联盟能否减少合作伙伴之间的专利诉讼？基于合作竞争理论,引入联盟学习观点,分析专利池内企业之间专利诉讼的影响机理,并以MPEGLA公司12个专利池内64家企业数据作为样本,运用负二项回归模型实证检验专利池重复联盟次数、探索式合作水平、联盟学习强度对池内成员企业之间专利诉讼的影响。结果发现：探索式合作水平提高,降低了企业对池内其它企业专利诉讼强度;重复联盟次数越多、联盟学习强度越大,企业对池内其它企业发起专利诉讼的行为就越严重。研究结论在理论上可为专利池提供新的分析视角,在实践上可为企业实施专利联盟战略、有效运用并防范专利诉讼提供重要参考与借鉴。     

Demographics and Behaviour

Using a unique experimental subject pool, I analyse the behaviour of subjects in a life-cycle consumption experimental task. As in previous experiments, it is clear that different subjects solve the task differently – some having strategies close to the fully optimal and others using simple heuristics. The nature of my subject pool enables me to see if there is any link between the strategies employed by the subjects and their demographic characteristics. I also explore whether the parameters in the task influence the chosen strategy. I find little systematic demographic influence. The results of the paper have an important message concerning the representativeness of typical subject pools used in economics experiments.JEL Classification: C91, D91     

Asset Securitization and Welfare Compensation for House Demolition on New-Type Urbanization in China

In this paper we design a compensation mechanism for the relocated households in the process of New-Type Urbanization in China. Based on the theories of dynamic rent spatial separation, bid-rent and non-renewable resource exploitation, we give a theretical look at how the current compensation mechanism shapes the welfare of relocated households. Firstly, land rent growth has a spatial difference and the growth rate of the marginal location rent is much higher than that of the mature site. Secondly, there is a demolition championship contest under the sole static money compensation, which can easily lead to land urbanization faster than population urbanization. Thirdly, in the long run the welfare loss of the household is mainly due to the absence of a dynamic compensation mechanism. Furthermore, we design a dynamic compensation mechanism based on the establishment of an asset securitization capital pool, which could be an alternative scheme in the process of New-Type Urbanization.     

Can inefficient public production promote welfare?

Conclusion Politicians believe in an old fashioned conjecture. They all think welfare must always be increased if one only reduce inefficiency. But this intuition is wrong. If we look at piecemeal price changes, temporarily decreasing efficiency can be necessary for improving welfare.This conclusion shows that the usual argument of political administrations to advise the management of public enterprises to reduce the inefficiency of production can, under the above mentioned circumstances, lead to welfare losses. On this account the efficiency rule of thumb must be supported by welfare considerations, otherwise misleading results can occur.But we should not be too concerned. If the starting point of the piecemeal policy path is located not too far from the welfare optimum, the usual efficiency argument leads to satisfactory results.Last not least we mentioned the economic duality of decreasing efficiency and instability; here our results fit into the usual conception of the economists' world.This research was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sonderforschungsbereich 303. I am grateful to Dieter Bös, Udo Ebert, and Hans-Dieter Stolper as well as the anonymous referees of this journal for extensive comments on previous drafts of this paper.     

A Welfare Analysis of Policy Responses to the Skilled Wage Premium

I build a model with heterogeneous agents which is consistent both with rising wage inequality across education levels and with an increasing relative number of college graduates. I use the model to investigate the welfare implications of policies which influence the structure of net wages. Each policy affects agents directly through taxes and subsides and indirectly as wages respond to changes in the relative supply of skilled and unskilled workers. I find that as wage inequality grows due to skill-biased technological change, policies which promote a more egalitarian wage structure can become increasingly acceptable to all agents and that for nearly all agents, education subsidies may be preferred to direct transfers as a means of decreasing wage inequality. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E60, I28, H52.     

专利特征对加入专利池的影响——基于MPEG LA的实证研究

什么特征的专利更容易加入专利池？以MPEGLA专利池内1073件专利与池外1073件控制专利为样本,实证研究专利技术范围、权利与地域范围、审批与维持时间、前向与后向引用对加入专利池的影响。结果表明,技术和地域覆盖范围越广,维持时间越长,专利引用与被引数次越多,越有可能加入专利池;专利审批时间越长,非专利文献引用越多,越难加入专利池;权利要求范围对专利能否入池无显著影响。研究结论对企业专利文件撰写、专利入池申请及专利池管理机构开展专利评估具有重要意义。     

Welfare costs of shifting trend inflation

This paper studies the welfare consequences of exogenous variations in trend inflation in a New Keynesian economy. Consumption and leisure respond asymmetrically to a rise and a decline in trend inflation. As a result, an increase in the variance of shocks to the trend inflation process decreases welfare not only by increasing the volatilities of consumption and leisure, but also by decreasing their average levels. I find that the welfare cost of drifting trend inflation is modest and that it comes mainly from reduced average levels of consumption and leisure, not from their increased volatilities.     

Green consumers and environmental policy

The present paper examines how improvements in consumers' environmental awareness influence the choice between output and emission taxes, within a framework of imperfect competition and endogenous choice of abatement level. We first show that in the absence of policy intervention, there exists a level of environmental awareness beyond which welfare is decreasing as market imperfections become more prominent relative to environmental concerns. We also confirm that both output and emission taxes are welfare superior to the free-market case. What is surprising, however, is that the welfare performance of an optimally chosen emissions tax is monotonically decreasing in consumers' environmental sensitivity, while the opposite is true for an output tax up to a certain level. At low levels of consumers' environmental awareness an emissions tax is welfare superior, but eventually, there is a level of environmental awareness beyond which an output-tax welfare dominates an emissions tax. Therefore, an emissions tax is better suited to societies that have not yet developed high levels of environmental awareness, while societies characterized by high levels of environmental awareness should prefer an output tax.     

Minimum wage spillover effects and social welfare in a model of stochastic job matching

In this paper, I carry out a welfare analysis of the minimum wage in the framework of a Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides model with stochastic job matching. I explore the role of the minimum wage in a labor market with trading externalities and present the necessary and sufficient condition for a minimum wage hike to be efficiency enhancing. In this context, I characterize minimum wage spillover effects and demonstrate that there is a direct link between the welfare effects and spillover effects of a minimum wage. This theoretical finding suggests that the welfare impact of minimum wage changes can be inferred from the empirical observation of spillover effects on the wage distribution.     

Capital Imports and Tariffs

This paper develops a three‐sector, three‐factor specific factor model with a tariff and presents conditions under which capital imports and tariffs can be welfare enhancing in a developing country. The impact on welfare depends on the tariff revenue effect and the repatriation effect. A capital import is welfare enhancing if it reduces the domestic output of imports. A tariff is welfare enhancing only if it reduces the return to foreign capital.     

专利联盟成员技术竞合对成员创新绩效的影响

专利联盟存在竞合现象，联盟成员技术竞合究竟是阻碍创新还是激励创新？着眼于专利联盟成员竞合网络，将技术合作划分为探索式合作和利用式合作，将技术竞争划分为学习型竞争和诉讼型竞争，以2006—2019年MPEGLA公司12个专利联盟的76个成员为研究样本，运用负二项回归实证检验专利联盟成员技术竞合对联盟成员创新绩效的影响。研究发现：探索式合作、利用式合作和学习型竞争有利于成员创新绩效提升，而诉讼型竞争不利于成员创新绩效提升；学习型竞争和诉讼型竞争对双元合作的创新激励效应均具有显著负向调节作用。     

An Overlapping-generations Model of Escape Clause Protection

The paper explores the efficiency consequences of using temporary protection to ease adjustment following an unexpected, permanent improvement in a country's terms of trade. In the model, workers trade off the potentially higher wage that the export sector has to offer with a lower job acquisition rate. An unexpected improvement in the terms of trade surprises old workers who cannot undo the decisions they made while young. Some old workers who had not planned to search for work in the export sector end up changing their plans, adding to the pool of searchers, creating congestion. Temporary protection can reduce congestion and make the transition to the new steady state smoother. Moreover, there are conditions under which the congestion externalities lead to multiple steady‐state equilibria that can be Pareto‐ranked. Temporary protection may lead to a permanent change in the allocation of resources, and this permanent change may be welfare‐enhancing.     

Can welfare be measured with a preference-satisfaction index?

Welfare in economics is generally conceived of in terms of the satisfaction of preferences, but a general, comparable index measure of welfare is generally not taken to be possible. In recent years, in response to the usage of measures of subjective well-being as indices of welfare in economics, a number of economists have started to develop measures of welfare based on preference-satisfaction. In order to evaluate the success of such measures, I formulate criteria of policy-relevance and theoretical success in the context of preference-satisfaction measures of welfare. I present a detailed case study of the methodological choices put forward in a prominent generalized proposal for measuring welfare through preferences recently published in the American Economic Review. I contrast this with an alternative welfare measure which also uses preferences to weight aspects of welfare: the ICECAP-A measure. I assess the methodology of both approaches in detail and argue that the two goals of a preference measure of welfare can only be satisfied at the expense of making a measure prohibitively costly.     

Public debt and welfare in a quantitative Schumpeterian growth model with incomplete markets

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of counterfactual public debt policies using an endogenous growth model with incomplete markets. The economy features public debt, Schumpeterian growth, infinitely-lived agents, uninsurable income risk, and discount factor heterogeneity. Two versions of the model are specified, one with households holding equity in the group of innovating firms. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy to match the degree of wealth inequality, the share of R&D expenditure in GDP, the firms’ exit rate, the average growth rate, and other standard long-run targets. When comparing balanced growth paths, I find large welfare gains in equilibria characterized by governments accumulating public wealth. The result is robust to the mechanism used to generate a highly concentrated wealth (i.e., preference heterogeneity or “superstar” income shocks). Welfare effects decompositions show that level effects and growth effects reinforce each other. The responses of both the intermediate goods and their market conditions are key in explaining the large level effects. The version of the model without equity is computationally easier to solve, allowing to consider transitional dynamics. Taking into account the dynamic adjustment to the new long-run equilibrium, I show that the transitional welfare costs are not large enough to change the sign of the welfare effects stemming from a change in public debt. I find that eliminating public debt would lead to a 0.8% increase in welfare, while moving to a debt/GDP ratio of 100% would entail a welfare loss of 0.5%. A decomposition analysis shows that growth accounts for approximately 50% of the overall welfare effects.     

On justifying a minimum welfare state

Since anarchy is not viable, limited government is the best that the realistic libertarian can hope for. But limited government will itself always be threatened by an inherent tendency to transgress its limits. In modern western societies the regulatory and redistributive welfare state is the major threat to a constitution of liberty. However, a “minimum welfare state” which redistributes personal income among its citizens may comply with the same principles of individual liberty and the rule of law that are embodied in the protective state. Since any state, including the minimal state, necessarily incorporates regulation and redistribution and thus is a welfare state of sorts the non-anarchist liberal should turn against welfare state privileges rather than against redistribution and regulation per se. He may even have good reason to go beyond the minimal state to found a “minimum welfare state” if this is instrumental in securing liberty under the rule of law. I am grateful to the Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University for hospitality both during the period in which this paper was written and on other occasions. I am deeply indebted to the people at the Center for their criticisms and comments. As far as this paper is concerned Geoffrey Brennan's and Richard Wagner's comments were particularly helpful. I should also like to acknowledge helpful oral comments from Kevin Mulligan and Philip van Parijs, who of course is much more of an expert on demogrant schemes than I am. I also wish to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions. The general caveat applies.     

Optimal fiscal decentralization: Redistribution and welfare implications

The literature has been inconclusive regarding the welfare effects of fiscal decentralization (FD), defined here as the extent to which local governments collect and spend local tax revenues. We present an original model to investigate formally the distributional and welfare implications of FD. In contrast to the standard approach that compares the implications of full FD with that of centralization, we consider that the central government chooses the level of FD to maximize welfare in a heterogeneous country. Noncooperatively, local governments choose their tax collection effort to maximize local utility. We show that an increase in the tax rate leads optimal FD to increase so as to compensate for the welfare loss from decreasing optimal local tax effort. Hence, welfare and income distribution improve in FD at its intermediate, rather than extreme, levels. We coin this result as the decentralization-Laffer curve. As regional spillovers increase, FD is less desirable as it deteriorates welfare and income distribution. This finding provides a novel support for the decentralization theorem and contributes to the fiscal policy debate.     

Comments on John Roemer’s first welfare theorem of market socialism*

Abstract

In this comment on John Roemer’s “theory of cooperation with an application to market socialism”, I extend Roemer’s first welfare theorem of market socialism in two directions. First, I prove a version of the theorem that deals with non-linear taxation. Second, I offer a connection between the theorem and welfare equality. I then argue that the models and questions that Roemer contribute to bring to welfare economics raise questions that go much beyond the research on socialist ethics. In particular, I introduce a positive model of moral behavior that yields different predictions from Roemer’s Kantian model. I conclude that individual morality should become a central concern of welfare economists.     

Fiscal efficiency,redistribution and welfare

The expanding literature on fiscal decentralization (FD) emphasizes the role of institutional mechanisms for FD's welfare effects. We analyze the welfare effects of FD in case of a fiscal transfer mechanism that punishes inefficiency in tax collection and compensates for local income deficiency. In addition, a portion of transfers is earmarked for investment. Given a level of FD and these rules, the representative local government chooses its tax collection effort to maximize local utility. The solution of the model reveals that the stricter the redistributive rule, the higher are steady-state fiscal efficiency and welfare. While the effectiveness of the redistributive parameters increases with centralization of the revenue pool, it decreases with the tax rate. Both welfare and income distribution, on the other hand, improve with the degree of revenue centralization and the tax rate. Besides, fiscal efficiency and redistribution decrease with investment-earmarked transfers.