Winston, Aisling

Job market paper

Government Choice of Intellectual Property Rights Protection

This paper proposes a general model of a government's choice of intellectual property rights protection given the structure of the import market, the distribution of consumer incomes, and the preferences of the government. It also presents local government autonomy as a possible explanation for divergence of de facto protection from formal protection. A case study of the pharmaceutical industry in Jordan is used to motivate the model, and measures of de facto and formal intellectual property rights protection are used to test the implications of the model.