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Full-Text Articles in Public Economics

Originality, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein Mar 2009

Originality, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay we introduce a model of copyright law that calibrates authors’ rights and liabilities to the level of originality in their works. We advocate this model as a substitute for the extant regime that unjustly and inefficiently grants equal protection to all works satisfying the “modicum of creativity” standard. Under our model, highly original works will receive enhanced protection and their authors will also be sheltered from suits by owners of preexisting works. Conversely, authors of less original works will receive diminished protection and incur greater exposure to copyright liability. We operationalize this proposal by designing separate rules …


Predicting Life Expectancy: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis, Audrey B. Hendricks, Philip E. Graves Jan 2009

Predicting Life Expectancy: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis, Audrey B. Hendricks, Philip E. Graves

PHILIP E GRAVES

Most economic research on life expectancy focuses on building forecasting models using mortality trends or constructing parameter life expectancy models with samples of individuals. We here provide a cross-sectional model of life expectancy, using a comprehensive worldwide sample, which analyses the impact of country level variables on average life expectancy. The model variants suggest robustly that proxies for technology, education, disposable income and healthcare all have a significant and positive effect on country variation in average life expectancy, at all income levels. A proxy for the health risks/epidemics factor is significantly negative. This analysis provides information of use to governments, …