James Watt's 1769 patent is widely supposed to have stood in the way of the development of high-pressure steam technology until it finally expired in 1800. We dispute this popular claim. We show that, although it is true that high-pressure steam technology developed only after the expiration of...

We study the welfare impact of rules of origin in free trade agreements where final-good producers source customized inputs from suppliers within the trading bloc. We employ a property-rights framework that features hold-up problems in suppliers' decisions to invest, and where underinvestment is...

The increasing use of the Internet creates a need to manage traffic while preserving equal treatment of content. We estimate demand for residential broadband, using high-frequency data from subscribers facing a three-part tariff, and use the estimates to study the welfare implications of...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby...

We study how a preferential trade agreement (PTA) affects international sourcing decisions, aggregate productivity and welfare under incomplete contracting and endogenous matching. Contract incompleteness implies underinvestment. That inefficiency is mitigated by a PTA, because the agreement...

In 1982, the US Congress established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) as the sole appellate court for patent cases. Ostensibly, this court was created to eliminate inconsistencies in the application and interpretation of patent law across federal courts, and thereby mitigate...

In this paper, we study efficient dissolution of partnerships in a context of incomplete information. We generalize the results of Cramton, Gibbons and Klemperer (1987) to situations where the partnership takes on a common value that may depend upon all partners' types, so that each partner's...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby...

I introduce and analyze an equilibrium model of discovery, innovation, patenting and infringement. Firms that innovate must adapt complementary inputs, and are ex ante uncertain about whether adaptations will be costly and whether they will infringe other patents. If adaptation requires...

This paper studies the problem of partnership dissolution in the context of asymmetric information. Past work shows that the initial share allocation, interdependence of partners’ valuations, and asymmetric control all affect the possibility of efficient dissolution. In this paper, I show, in...