Walter Park is Associate Professor of Economics at the American University. Professor Park's general field of research is economic growth, with a particular focus on international patenting and research and development, and his publications centre around developing measures of patent rights among countries and examining how patent protection affects innovation, technology diffusion, and productivity growth among countries. He has also published articles quantifying the extent to which research and development generate international knowledge spillovers.
Professor Park obtained a B.A. from the University of Toronto, an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Yale University and he has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also conducted research projects for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), the World Bank, the United States Department of Energy, and the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA).