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This thesis proves that intangible assets are impossible to accurately value because of their inherently complex attributes. Intangibles have always existed in the market, but their presence has nearly quadrupled in the last few decades due to the Information Revolution. This technological breakthrough was characterized by the globalization of knowledge, communication, and trade. This dissemination of knowledge due to the infrastructural changes of both the telecommunication and transportation industries transformed the economy from a ‘product-driven’ market to a ‘knowledge-driven’ market. This surge in intangible assets is significant because it proves that “knowledge-driven” elements are now material to company value. As such, accurate measurement of intangible assets is essential to preserving the reliability of financial statements. Current accounting practices largely ignore the value created by intangible asset and this has serious consequences for investors, firms, and the economy as a whole. Insufficient accounting of intangible assets distorts company value, increases the cost of capital, and compromises the reliability of financial statements. While it is utterly impossible to create accounting standards that will, without fail, accurately measure all intangible assets as well as take into account their lifespans, volatility, increasing economies of scale, partial excludability, and lack of tradability, this thesis proposes a way to help mitigate the disparity between what financial statements recognize and what companies actually generate.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) have become a major problem in the relationship between the industrialized West and the developing South, primarily because the West demands that developing countries adopt and enforce Western IPR. Since the relationship between US corporations and Chinese businesses is among the most successful and at the center of the current process of globalization, IPR have been a major cause of conflict and controversy between them and serve as an exemplar for this thesis. I argue, first, that the reason that a large number of Chinese businesses, especially privately-owned small and medium-sized enterprises, infringe foreign IPR lies in the nature of the difference between what have been mostly low-tech traditional Chinese businesses and high-tech industrial economies, to which intellectual property laws belong. Second, I demonstrate that the steady improvement of intellectual property protection in the more successful areas of development in the Chinese economy suggests that the solution for improved IPR protection in China and perhaps other emerging nations will follow, not precede, the development and transformation of a low-tech pre-industrial economy into an industrial high-tech economy.

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This dissertation will take a theoretical approach to analyzing certain challenges in the design of intellectual property rights (`IPR') policy. The first essay looks the advisability of introducing IPR into a market which is currently only very lightly protected - the US fashion industry. The proposed Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act is intended to introduce EU standards into the US. Using a sequential, 2-firm, vertical differentiation framework, I analyze the effects of protection on investment in innovative designs by high-quality (`designer') and lower-quality (`mass-market') firms when the mass-marketer may opt to imitate, consumers prefer trendsetting designs and firms compete in prices. I show that design protection, by transforming mass-marketers from imitators to innovators, may reduce both designer pro ts and welfare. The model provides possible explanations for the dearth of EU case law and the increase in designer/mass-marketer collaborations. The second essay contributes to the literature on patent design and fee shifting, contrasting the effects of the American (or `each party pays') rule and English (or `losing party pays') rule of legal cost allocation on optimal patent breadth when innovation is sequential and firms are differentiated duopolists. I show that if litigation spending is endogenous, the American rule may induce broader patents and a higher probability of infringement than the English rule if R&D costs are sufficiently low. If, however, R&D costs are moderate, the ranking is reversed and it is the English rule that leads to broader patents. Neither rule supports lower patent breadth than the other over the entire parameter space. As such, any attempts to reform the US patent system by narrowing patents must carefully weigh the impact on firms' legal spending decisions if policymakers do not wish to adversely affect investment incentives. The third and final essay analyzes the effects of corporate structure on licensing behaviour. Policymakers and legal scholars are concerned about the potential for an Anticommons, an underuse of early stage research tools to produce complex final products, typically arising from either blocking or stacking. I use a simple, one-period differentiated duopoly model to show that if patentees have flexibility in corporate structure, Anticommons problems are greatly reduced. The model suggests that if the patentee owns the single (or single set) of essential IPR and goods are of symmetric quality, Anticommons issues may be entirely eliminated, as the patentee will always license, simply shifting its corporate structure depending on the identity of the downstream competitor. If the rival produces a more valuable good, Anticommons problems are reduced. Further, if the patentee holds 1 of 2 essential patents, the ability to shift its corporate structure may reduce total licensing costs to rival firms. However the analysis offers a cautionary note: while spin-offs by the patentee help to sustain downstream competition, they may restrict market output, and therefore welfare. Thus the inefficiency in the patent system may be in the opposite direction than is currently thought - there may be too much technology transfer, rather than too little.

M.Comm. / Intangible assets are increasingly becoming the critical determinant of value creation and future profitability of most businesses. There is a clear distinction between the accounting treatment of physical assets and are reported on the firm’s balance sheets, but intangible assets are by large written off in the income statement, along with regular expenses such as wages, rents and interest. This distorted treatment of intangibles in an accounting sense, has dire consequences for managers, investors and policymakers relying on financial information, thus giving an extremely limited view of a company’s potential for value creation and are virtually worthless as a basis for assessing the value of intangible assets as a whole. This paper is limited to the valuation of intellectual property and intangible assets not reflected on the balance sheet and is primarily aimed at researching, exploring and identifying various intangible asset valuation techniques used to make investment decisions; the advantages and disadvantages of each valuation method so identified; identifying which one or more of the valuation methods identified is the most appropriate measure to valuate intangible assets; identifying the accuracy of the most appropriate valuation method selected as compared with the other methods. The problems posed by intangible assets appear to be based on two levels. The first is the difficulty to identify, collect and analyse data regarding intangible assets. The second overlapping level is the lack of external financial reporting on intangibles. The problem herein manifests itself in the lack of recognition of the current accounting principles, thus resulting in intangible assets not being systematically reported in financial statements leading to a lopsided view of the assets employed by a company to generate revenues.

Different researchers commit themselves to differing hypotheses when addressing the relationship between attitudes to unauthorised copying of software and the level of moral development. Some concentrate on moral intensity, others on moral judgement and still others on ethical decision-making. Some researchers assert that no one single hypothesis is correct but that certain hypotheses will be true under certain conditions. The idea that there is no single correct hypothesis has paved the way for the consideration of moderator variables of the attitudes to unauthorised copying of software and the level of moral development relationship. One variable in particular, that is, the Knowledge of Intellectual Property laws, has not yet been empirically examined in terms of its capacity as a moderator for this relationship. This exploratory, non-experimental, cross-sectional design explores the relationship between attitudes to unauthorised copying of software and the level of moral development as well as the effect of Knowledge of Intellectual Property laws on this relationship. A questionnaire was distributed to three medium-sized organisations in the Johannesburg area. The questionnaire consisted of a biographical blank and three different scales. The biographical blank was used as a means of examining the computer background of the respondents whilst the scales measured respondent attitudes to unauthorised copying of software, levels of moral development and respondent knowledge of Intellectual Property laws. The researcher received responses from 150 respondents from across the three organisations. It was with these 150 responses that two types of analyses were conducted. The initial analysis was a Pearson’s Product-Moment Correlation which was used to determine the nature of the relationship between attitudes to unauthorised copying of software and level of moral development. The second analysis was a moderated multiple regression which was used to determine the moderator impact of Knowledge of Intellectual Property laws on the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The results of the correlation indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between the respondents’ attitudes to unauthorised copying of software and the level of moral development. Additionally, there are significant relationships between each measured level of moral development with the respondents’ attitudes. The moderated multiple linear regression revealed that Knowledge of Intellectual Property laws does not have a moderating effect on the relationship between attitudes to unauthorised copying of software. A discussion of these findings is included together with limitations and practical implications of the study as well as recommendations for future research.

48 pages / Policy on the parallel imports of medicines is being debated currently in Korea. This paper looks at several countries' trends, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, and the Korean golf market to search for policy ideas. A simple consumer welfare benefit-cost and sensitivity analysis shows that parallel imports give not only consumers' surplus on parallel imported golf clubs, but also a much larger consumers' surplus on authorized brand versions.This paper makes the following recommendations: First, parallel imports should be permitted according to the principle of free trade, if the cost of parallel imports to the country is not much larger than the benefit. Second, even if parallel impmts are pem1itted, some exceptional cases should be allowed where international exhaustion is problematic. Third, governmental intervention, a clear labeling system, for example, is required to protect consumers, and help consumers make rational choices. / Note: This digital copy was scanned from a personal copy, and contains some underlining and marginalia.

This dissertation consists of three essays that sit at the intersection of international trade, political economy and the economics of innovation. It analyzes from a critical perspective the relationship between organized interest groups and international agreements on trade and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and offers new theoretical insights, which it then supports empirically. My first essay calls into question the logic of the standard Grossman-Helpman/Bagwell-Staiger model of trade agreements, according to which governments enter international treaties to prevent terms-of-trade manipulation and special interest politics has a trivial role. Despite its immense popularity, it remains inconsistent with observed trade policy and with the practitioners' understanding of trade treaties. By assuming that subsidies have additional political cost beyond their monetary cost, I show how international agreements result in the reduction of political protectionism through the crucial role of exporting lobbies in the negotiations process. At the same time, the model resolves three prominent puzzles in the literature: the terms-of-trade puzzle, the anti-trade bias puzzle and the inefficient redistribution puzzle. Finally I find empirical support for the model and my key assumption using data on US agricultural trade policy. In the second essay I propose a model that considers the effect of firm lobbying for IPR protection in an international setting in innovation-driven economies. In particular, I compare the IPR protection level and global social welfare between the case when countries set their IPR policies non-cooperatively and when they enter an international treaty, such as the TRIPS, TPP and TTIP. I find that lobbying necessarily leads to inefficient international agreements resulting in too much IPR protection and may even be welfare-reducing relative to no cooperation. I also show that international lobbying and high concentration of capital can further exacerbate this outcome. The model generates predictions consistent with patterns I find in the data on US firms' lobbying expenditures and the value of their international patent portfolios. Finally, the third essay provides a critique of a popular structural patent valuation methodology that utilizes the stock market response to news about patent grants, first introduced by Kogan et al. (2012). Using their methodology (refined and improved in terms of the theoretical derivation), I perform a placebo estimation of US patent values and compare the results with the true patent value estimates as per Kogan et al's paper. I find strong evidence that the "true" patent value estimates are not driven by patent news announcements, but rather are an artifact of the estimation methodology itself and as such cannot be used for comparisons across different patent-holding firms and grant years. I further corroborate the external validity of this critique by applying the same method to a novel database of Chinese patents and finding that the same conclusion holds.

In 1793, the nascent French republic established its first intellectual property law called droit d’auteur. This statute affected the visual arts and literature in equal measure, such that from a legal perspective, a painting and a manuscript were now treated as equivalent entities. Whereas literary critics have traced the impacts of this legislation on the production of novels and poetry, and legal historians have detailed its ramifications in nineteenth-century case law, art historians have yet to examine how this consolidation of the sister arts under the rubric of the auteur affected the development of the visual arts and aesthetic practices in the same period. Thus, despite ongoing interest in authorship across the humanities, scholars have operated with an only partial understanding of the subject. My thesis documents how French institutions of authorship, which included courtrooms, print shops, publishing houses, post offices, and libraries, coordinated an increasingly transnational field of textual and pictorial activities. More importantly, it analyses how these same institutions led to the creation of historically significant visual forms. Through a series of case studies of five canonical painters and writers, I offer a revised account of the emergence of modern art in France on the basis of the intimacies and antagonisms felt to exist between these differing artistic spheres. Chapter 1 follows the transition from the ancien régime’s system of artistic privilege to the modern administration of artist’s rights in the work of the royal portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. By analyzing her 1835 memoirs alongside some of her key post-Revolutionary paintings, I establish the artist as a leading theoretician-practitioner of a new, legitimist aesthetics. Chapter 2 focuses on the classical aesthetic conflict between picture making and writing as it was expressed in the posthumously published diaries of Eugène Delacroix. I interpret his diary’s Romantic notion of pictorial specificity as an early variant of pictorial modernism. Chapter 3 explores the intertwined politics of exile and authorship in Victor Hugo’s enigmatic ink drawings. Tracking their creation in Guernsey to their eventual bequest alongside the writer’s literary manuscripts to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this chapter also offers the first art history of the French national library, which, months prior to the opening of the Louvre, became the country’s first true public domain of images. Chapter 4 chronicles the emergence of the first global infrastructure for authors of art through an analysis of what I have called Vincent van Gogh’s “postal paradigm.” It demonstrates how the émigré artist substituted traditional academic protocols of education, critical evaluation, and reception with newly internationalized postal instruments and, additionally, how the formation of the Universal Postal Union facilitated the expansion of the international art market in the 1880s. Chapter 5 analyzes writer Émile Zola’s photographs taken in the 1890s in relation to a key aspect of his magnum opus, the Rougon-Macquart series: its conclusion. This chapter charts the consequential overlapping of two significant aesthetic debates in the 1880s and 1890s, both of which have until now been treated as unrelated— (1) the critiques and debates surrounding Zola’s experimental aesthetics; and (2) the contestations over the court’s role in determining photography’s status as authored. The project concludes with an epilogue that utilizes the project’s author concept to re-interpret early art historical theory.