Barragan Arce, Mario Julio (Author)
There is a widespread conviction within the agricultural economics profession that US plant variety innovation during the nineteenth century was insignificant. My dissertation contributes to this literature in two respects. At the data level, it introduces previously untapped archival sources to challenge the above belief. With these data I attempt to answer, for a selected number of crops, how much biological innovation occurred during the nineteenth century. I take a fresh approach to this issue by directly counting innovations. To count innovations per year I use variety lists generated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I find that, in most cases, there is no strong evidence of proportionality between the number of plant variety and patented innovations. At the theoretical level, my dissertation challenges conventional wisdom on the motivations of private sector innovation. I begin by rioting that most innovations were made by the private sector under "harsh" conditions: patents for plants did not exist, plant innovations could be easily copied, and there was no way to rely on secrecy. This is taken to constitute evidence against the predictions of conventional theories on the economics of innovation. I then continue to explore whether predictions of "first mover" advantage models are compatible with the data. I do this at two levels. At the firm level I study the time paths of prices for newly introduced strawberry plant varieties. I constructed these time series from lists published by nursery and seeds men of the time. I find that new successful varieties start earning a premium, which slowly disappears over time. This is what the theory predicts. At the industry level, I study how the equilibrium number of firms in the industry is affected by upward shifts in demand. I find that, as demand increases, more breeders enter the market, and hence, more varieties are innovated. This is consistent with predictions of the theory. I conclude with a discussion on the implications of these new data and this new theoretical paradigm for two important policy instruments of twentieth century US agriculture: intellectual property rights and public sector innovation.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/06 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3268971.
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