There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

The conventional approach to retirement and life insurance planning, which is used throughout the financial planning industry, differs markedly from the economic approach. The conventional approach asks households to specify how much they want to spend before retirement, after retirement, and in...

A significant amount of software development is being outsourced to countries such as India. Many Indian software firms have applied for and received quality certifications like the ISO9001, and the number of quality certified software firms has steadily increased. Despite its growing popularity...

How do you measure the value of a commodity that transacts at a price of zero from an economic standpoint? This study examines the potential for and extent of omission and misattribution in standard approaches to economic accounting with regards to open source software, an unpriced commodity in...

U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial concentration of patents and...

The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage,...

How should researchers design panel data experiments? We analytically derive the variance of panel estimators, informing power calculations in panel data settings. We generalize Frison and Pocock (1992) to fully arbitrary error structures, thereby extending McKenzie (2012) to allow for...

We argue that the intrinsic inefficiency of proprietary software has historically created a space for alternative institutions that provide software as a public good. We discuss several sources of such inefficiency, focusing on one that has not been described in the literature: the...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the private value of patents and R&D in European firms during the period 1991-2004. We explore the relationship between firm's stock market value, patents, and "quality"-weighted patents issued by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the US Patent...

We investigate the value creation or destruction associated with the introduction of software patents in the United States in two ways. The first looks at the cumulative abnormal returns to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firms around the time of important court decisions that...