According to a common argument, the presence of strong intellectual property rights spurs innovation, which then leads to fiercer competition, higher economic growth and increasing benefits for the average consumers. We argue that, in the case of intellectual property rights, this has lead to misconceptions and abuses. Current legislation on intellectual property confuses the protection of property rights on objects in which ideas are embodied with the attribution of monopoly power on the idea itself and, furthermore, with restrictions on the usage of such goods on the part of the buyers. This implies that both patent and copyright laws should be dramatically altered. To back up our claim we provide theoretical arguments, even for the most extreme case in which goods are produced at a positive fixed cost and zero marginal cost.

This paper argues that incompleteness of intertemporal financial markets has little effect (on welfare, prices, or consumption) in an economy with a single consumption good, provided that traders are long–lived and patient, a riskless bond is traded, shocks are transitory, and there is no aggregate risk. In an economy with aggregate risk, a similar conclusion holds, provided traders share the same CRRA utility function and the right assets are traded. Examples demonstrate that these conclusions need not hold if the wrong assets are traded or if the economy has multiple consumption goods.

A security design model shows that multinational firms needing to finance their operations should issue different securities to investors in different countries in order to aggregate their disparate information about domestic and foreign cash flows. However, if the firm becomes bankrupt, investors may face uncertain costs of reorganizing assets in a foreign country and thus may value foreign assets at their average value. This penalizes superior firms with low reorganization costs. Such firms minimize the adverse selection penalty by designing securities that allocate all the cash flow in bankruptcy to investors for which the adverse selection costs are the smallest given the exchange rate. We show that this sharing rule can be implemented with currency swaps because these instruments allow the priorities of claims in bankruptcy to switch depending on the exchange rate.