Essays In The Economics Of Intellectual Property And Innovation

This dissertation examines two closely related topics: first, intellectual property institutions and their impacts, and second, the supply and demand of innovation in health care markets. In the first chapter, I document the presence of “imperfect” intellectual property rights in the pharmaceutical industry and provide the first evidence on the extent to which they impact competition. The second chapter, joint with Matthew Grennan and Mara Lederman, quantifies the extent to which performance advantages driven by innovation in one product line induce spillovers across other related product lines in the medical device sector. The third and final chapter reviews changes to intellectual property rights as they relate to industry-university ties, with a focus on biotechnology.