Self-employment: the role of intellectual property right laws

Andrew Burke and Stuart Fraser

Small Business Economics, 2012, vol. 39, issue 4, 819-833

Abstract: Little is known about the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on typically imitative self-employment. IPR laws have contrasting dual innovation creation and access effects on self-employment activity. The first effect is positive where strong IPR laws promote innovation and so create new opportunities for self-employment. The second effect is negative where strong IPR laws restrict access to innovation and technology used as inputs to self-employed businesses. Using a 33-country dataset over the period 1995–2000, we estimate the impact of IPR laws on self-employment, helping to fill the vacuum of empirical evidence that has plagued policy decision making in this area. We find that patent activity has a negative effect on self-employment. However, overall, we find that more extensive and strong IPR laws have a net positive effect on self-employment activity. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012

Keywords: Self-employment; Intellectual property rights; Law; L2; O33; O34; P48; L2; L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1007/s11187-011-9336-5

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