Intellectual property rights protection and endogenous economic growth revisited

We present an analytical solution to the lab-equipment R&D growth model with an exogenous rate of imitation and apply it to study the optimal level of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. This has already been studied in Kwan and Lai (2003); however, a mistake in writing out the dynamics of the problem has contaminated that analysis. For the whole parameter space considered there, the conclusion is no longer to strengthen IPR protection partially, but fully (a result which we prove analytically for the logarithmic utility function). The usual tradeoff persists, though, for different choices of parameters. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.