James Bessen appointed visiting professor at U.S.E.

James Bessen has been appointed Visiting Professor at Utrecht University School of Economics as of March 2019.

Professor Bessen graduated from Harvard University and is the founding and executive director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative (TPRI) at Boston University’s School of Law. He is an eminent scholar and expert on innovation and technology, having published influential and widely cited books and articles ranging across the fields of economics, law, and history. In particular, his research studies whether patents promote innovation, why innovators share new knowledge, and how technology affects jobs, skills, and wages.

As part of his appointment at Utrecht University, professor Bessen will periodically visit to give public lectures on his work and interact with Utrecht University scholars.

Examples of Bessen’s work are the books Patent Failure (Princeton University Press, 2008, with Michael J. Meurer), highlighting the problems caused by poorly defined property rights, and Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (Yale University Press, 2015), which looks at history to understand how new technologies affect wages and skills today.

Further, Bessen’s work has been widely cited in the press as well as by the White House, the US Supreme Court, judges at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Federal Trade Commission.