About me

Hello, my name is Benjamin Mitra-Kahn, and I have recently been appointed as Chief Economist at IP Australia, the Australian Government’s Intellectual Property Office, where I will take up post on 1 November 2012. This is quite an exciting development, and having relocated to Canberra, I am looking forward to some interesting times ahead.

This is my virtual home where you will find the papers I have written, updates on work in progress and my writing generally (under the Home tab), as well as a digital copy of my CV. The sub-menus suggests posts and papers by topic areas where I am working in a personal capacity of course.

This year has been very active one for me, with the UK government’s economic review of intellectual property taking up a lot of time and interest. This was a report commissioned by the Prime Minister and delivered by Ian Hargreaves in May 2011 with a lot of economic input. Following on from that, and with the collaboration of UK industry bodies I co-wrote a paper with Jonathan Haskel and Peter Goodridge to update the value of copyright investment in the UK national accounts, and found an additional £3.2bn investment by the music, film, publishing, arts, radio and TV sectors: published as “Updating the value of UK copyright investment” in June 2012.

Blogging has also become more a staple as  the History of Economics Playground blog joined forces with George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), giving a lot of interesting exposure and getting me to both Bretton Woods and Berlin for INET conferences. I have handed all the reins over for the New School Economic Review to the new generation of graduate students – and the latest issue entitled “What is Economics” is a great publication.

Academically things have been switched up a bit, with a publication in the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues on “Copyright, Evidence and Lobbynomics: The world after the UK’s Hargreaves Review” and being asked to review papers for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Oxford Economic Papers and a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology. I am still sitting on  a serious backlog of papers on both history of economics and now also IP which needs to be sent to editors, or reviewed for re-submission, while new work on patent thickets, patent backlogs and copyright issues in progress – so there is enough to do.

If you have any questions, ideas, thoughts or criticisms, feel free to get in touch on benjamin.at.mitrakahn.com or pop a comment in the relevant post.

-Benjamin Mitra-Kahn, 21 October 2012, Canberra