Much of the theoretical economics literature has assumed an unambiguous relationship between the strength of patent protection and the rate of innovation. This research address this assumption by ...examining the impact of major patent policy shifts in 60 nations over the past 150 years. It examines the changes in patent applications by residents of the nation undertaking the policy change. While the study tabulates domestic filings by residents and nonresidents alike, confounding factors may influence this measure. Thus, the research examines filings made by residents of the nation undertaking the policy change in a nation with a relatively constant patent policy, Great Britain. Adjusting for the change in overall patenting, the impact of patent protection-enhancing policy shifts on applications by residents was actually negative, whether filings in Great Britain or domestically were considered.
The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust
In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the ...Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution.
A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust.
The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.
The law of personal property covers a very wide spectrum of scenarios and has had little detailed scrutiny of its overarching structure over the years. This is a shame. It is a system and can best be ...understood as a system. Indeed without understanding it as a system, it becomes much more difficult to understand. The second edition of this acclaimed textbook continues to provide a comprehensive and yet detailed coverage of the law of personal property in England and Wales. It includes transfer of legal title to chattels, the nemo dat rule, negotiable instruments and assignment of choses in action. It also looks at defective transfers of property and the resulting proprietary claims, including those contingent on tracing, the tort of conversion, bailment and security interests. By bringing together areas often scattered throughout company law, commercial law, trusts and tort textbooks, it enables readers to see common themes and issues and to make otherwise impossible generalisations across different contexts about the nature of the concepts English law applies. Throughout the book, concepts are explained rigorously, with reference to how they are used in commercial practice and everyday life. The book will be of use to students on undergraduate commercial law courses, or related LLM courses, as well as those on integrated property law courses, and particularly specialised personal property modules. It will also be useful to academics and practitioners working in the area.
"Professor Robert Rennie has been one of the most influential voices in Scots private law over the past thirty years. Highly respected as both an academic and a practitioner, his contribution to the ...development of property law and practice has been substantial and unique. This volume celebrates his retirement from the Chair of Conveyancing at the University of Glasgow in 2014 with a selection of essays written by his peers and colleagues from the judiciary, academia and legal practice. Each chapter covers a topic of particular interest to Professor Rennie during his career, from the historical development of property law rules through to the latest developments in conveyancing practice and the evolution of the rules of professional negligence. Although primarily Scottish in focus, the contributions will have much of interest to lawyers in any jurisdiction struggling with similar practical problems, particularly those with similar legal roots including the Netherlands and South Africa. As a whole, the collection is highly recommended to students, practitioners and academics. "
Boom Towns Walters, Stephen J. K
2014, 2014-08-27
eBook
American cities, once economic and social launch pads for their residents, are all too often plagued by poverty and decay. One need only to look at the ruins of Detroit to see how far some once-great ...cities have fallen, or at Boston and San Francisco for evidence that such decline is reversible. In Boom Towns, Stephen J.K. Walters diagnoses the root causes of urban decline in order to prescribe remedies that will enable cities to thrive once again. Arguing that commonplace explanations for urban decay misunderstand the nature of our towns, Walters reconceives of cities as dense accumulations of capital in all of its forms—places that attract people by making their labor more productive and their leisure more pleasurable. Policymakers, therefore, must properly define and enforce property rights in order to prevent the flight of capital and the resulting demise of urban centers. Using vivid evocations of iconic towns and the people who crucially affected their destinies, Walters shows how public policy measures which aim to revitalize often do more harm than good. He then outlines a more promising set of policies to remedy the capital shortage that continues to afflict many cities and needlessly limit their residents' opportunities. With its fresh interpretation of one of the American quandaries of our day, Boom Towns offers a novel contribution to the debate about American cities and a program for their restoration.
This article responds to recent calls for organizational research to address larger, more globally relevant questions and to pay attention to history, by analyzing the crucial debate over ...intellectual property rights (IPR) between the United States and China. Despite the recent US position, the United States has not always been a leading IPR advocate. Rather, it was a leading IPR violator during the nineteenth century. An institution-based view of IPR history suggests that both the US refusal to protect foreign IPR in the nineteenth century and the current Chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet US IPR demands represent rational choices. However, as cost-benefit considerations change institutional transitions are possible. We predict that to the same extent the United States voluntarily agreed to strengthen IPR protection when its economy became sufficiently innovation-driven, China will similarly improve its IPR protection.
Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a 'memoryland' - littered ...with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this 'memory phenomenon' is related to the changing nature of identities - especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe - and with what effects.
Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It theorizes the various ways in which 'materializations' of identity work and relates these to different forms of identification within Europe. The book also addresses questions of methodology, including discussion of historical, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and innovative methods. Through a wide-range of case-studies from across Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is home to a much greater range of ways of making the past present than is usually realized - and a greater range of forms of 'historical consciousness'. At the same time, however, she seeks to highlight what she calls 'the European memory complex' - a repertoire of prevalent patterns in forms of recollection and 'past presencing'.
The examples in Memorylands are drawn from both the margins and metropolitan centres, from the relatively small-scale and local, the national and the avant-garde. The book looks at pasts that are potentially identity-disrupting - or 'difficult' - as well as those that affirm identities or offer possibilities for transcending national identities or articulating more cosmopolitan futures. Topics covered include authenticity, temporalities,
In this paper, we argue that those firms with higher levels of absorptive capacity can manage external knowledge flows more efficiently, and stimulate innovative outcomes. We test this contention ...with a sample of 2265 Spanish firms, drawn from the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) for 2000 and 2002, produced by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE). We find that absorptive capacity is indeed an important source of competitive advantage, especially in sectors characterized by turbulent knowledge and strong intellectual property rights protection. The implications for management practice and policy are also discussed.
Property Rights Anderson, Terry L; McChesney, Fred S
2018, 2018., 20180626, 2002
eBook
The institution of property is as old as mankind, and property rights are today deemed vital to a prosperous economic system. Much has been written in the last decade on the economics of the legal ...institutions protecting such rights. This unprecedented book provides a magnificent introduction to the subject. Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney have gathered twelve leading thinkers to explore how property rights arise, and how they bolster economic development. As the subtitle indicates, the book examines as well how controversies over valuable property rights are resolved: by agreement, by violence, or by law. The essays begin by surveying the approaches to property taken by early political economists and move to colorful applications of property rights theory concerning the Wild West, the Amazon, endangered species, and the broadcast spectrum. These examples illustrate the process of defining and defending property rights, and demonstrate what difference property rights make. The book then considers a number of topics raised by private property rights, analytically complex topics concerning pollution externalities, government taking of property, and land use management policies such as zoning. Overall, the book is intended as an introduction to the economics and law of property rights. It is divided into six parts, with each featuring an introduction by the editors that integrates prior chapters and material in coming chapters. In the end, the book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of an intriguing subject, accessible to anyone with a minimal background in economics. With chapters written by noted experts on the subject, Property Rights offers the first primer on the subject ever produced. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Louise De Alessi, Yoram Barzel, Harold Demsetz, Thráinn Eggertsson, Richard A. Epstein, William A. Fischel, David D. Haddock, Peter J. Hill, Gary D. Libecap, Dean Lueck, Edwin G. West, and Bruce Yandle.
The emergence of New Institutional Economics toward the end of the twentieth century profoundly changed our ideas about the organization of economic systems and their social and political ...foundations. Imperfect Institutions explores recent developments in this field and pushes the discussion forward by allowing for incomplete knowledge of social systems and unexpected system dynamics and, above all, by focusing explicitly on institutional policy. Empirical studies extending from Africa to Iceland are cited in support of the theoretical argument. In Imperfect Institutions Thráinn Eggertsson extends his attempt to integrate and develop the new field that began with his acclaimed Economic Behavior and Institutions (1990), which has been translated into six languages. This latest work analyzes why institutions that create relative economic backwardness emerge and persist and considers the possibilities and limits of institutional reform.
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