Walter G. Park is a Professor of Economics at American University. Currently, he also serves as the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at American University overseeing the doctoral and master’s programs in the college. He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of IP Management and on the advisory editorial board of Research Policy.
He has conducted research on the impacts of intellectual property rights on productivity growth, innovation, and technology diffusion. He has analyzed laws and regulations on copyrights and patents from a comparative international perspective and produced widely cited indexes of the strength of patent rights and copyrights for over 100 countries and over five decades. He is the editor of a recent Handbook on Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, published by Edward Elgar.
He is currently conducting research on the impact of uncertainty and business cycles on the patenting behavior of public companies, and the role that exposure to secondary patent resale markets plays in mitigating the effects of market uncertainty. He is also writing a monograph on international IP for World Scientific (in progress).
He has been a special sworn employee at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Industrial Relations at U.C. Berkeley and has conducted studies for the American Intellectual Property Law Association, Center for Global Development, European Patent Office, Industry Canada, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Bank, and the World Intellectual Property Organization, among others. His articles have appeared in Applied Economics, Economic Inquiry, Journal of International Business Studies, Research Policy, Review of Development Economics, Review of World Economics, and World Patent Information, among others. He has received grant support from the American Consortium on European Studies, European Patent office, Google Inc., Government of India, Motion Picture Association of America, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Park holds a doctorate in Economics from Yale University, a Master of Philosophy in Economics from Oxford University (as a Commonwealth Scholar), and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Statistics from the University of Toronto.