Rahmi Can Yamanoğlu

Collective intellectual property rights (CIPRs) — geographical indications (GIs) and collective trademarks (CTs) — are key instruments through which regions govern shared territorial and reputational assets, yet whether they enable or constrain regional innovation remains disputed. We argue that this question has no unconditional answer: the same instrument can operate as a coordination device or as a rent-preserving mechanism depending on the institutional environment in which it is embedded. Drawing on a panel of 240 EU NUTS-2 regions from 1996 to 2024, estimated on the 154 wine-producing regions among them, we relate wine-related GI and collective trademark registrations to subsequent individual trademark activity and test whether these associations are moderated by formal institutional quality, social trust, and peripherality. The average association between GIs and trademark activity is negative, while collective trademarks show no significant average association. The GI association, however, is institutionally contingent: it is positively and significantly moderated by formal governance quality — clearly negative where governance is weak, indistinguishable from zero where it is strong — whereas moderation by social trust is confined to the aggregate outcome and is not robust to the timing of the moderator; the GI association does not differ detectably between core and peripheral regions. These findings reframe the policy question from whether CIPRs help or hinder innovation to the institutional conditions under which they produce either outcome.

While women are globally underrepresented in patenting, female migrant inventors in the United States maintain a higher share of patents than native-born women, with substantial spatial variability across states. This paper examines how regional technological structures and institutional environments shape the geographic distribution of high-skilled female migrants. Estimating Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) models on a 2000–2011 panel of the 50 US states, we find that regional specialisation in chemistry strongly drives a higher female inventor share. Crucially, a destination state's institutional inclusiveness reduces the gender gap by actively substituting for these specialised sectors. Because these institutional interactions are highly specific to non-native female inventors, the findings imply that sub-national social and structural open economies act as distinct policy levers for states aiming to attract diverse international talent.

Geographical indications are conferred by a public authority and reward the reputation of a particular place by designation. Unlike the benefits distributive politics usually studies, a designation can be neither dosed nor withdrawn at will, and it transfers no funds. This paper asks whether it is handed out as a political reward in Turkey. We link the Turkish register to four waves of local elections, 2009–2024, and estimate Poisson models on a balanced panel of the 81 provinces with province and year fixed effects. Aligned provinces, whose mayoralty the governing coalition holds, register about 67 percent more than provinces held by the opposition. The reward concentrates where the coalition is secure, and it shows in the looser class and in prepared foods, not in designations of origin. Registrations neither rise before elections nor predict the coalition's next result. The shape of distributive politics depends on what is being distributed.