The standard economic model of police stops implies that the contraband hit rate should rise when the number of stops or searches per officer falls, ceteris paribus. We provide empirical corroboration of such optimizing models of police behavior by examining changes in stops and frisks around...

Data from 25 large U.S. cities is assembled to estimate the impact of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime. There is a widespread immediate drop in both criminal incidents and arrests most heavily pronounced among drug crimes, theft, residential burglaries, and most violent crimes. The...

Patent citations often proxy for the value of innovation, and the very need for a proxy demonstrates the difficulty of getting direct measures. We value patents using novel data from non-practicing entities (NPEs) licensing revenues, the largest sample with direct measures analyzed to date. We...

How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new theoretical and empirical evidence to fill that gap. In the...

How do non-practicing entities (“Patent Trolls”) impact innovation and technological progress? We employ unprecedented access to NPE-derived patent and financial data and a novel model to answer this question. We find that NPEs tend to acquire litigation-prone patents from small firms and...

How do non-practicing entities ("Patent Trolls") impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new theoretical and empirical evidence to fill that gap. In the...