Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of authorship is typically not available to the public. Moreover at...

The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the...

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights - as a result of the timing of Napoléon's military victories in Italy - to examine the effects of copyrights on creativity. To measure changes in creative output we compare changes in the creation of new operas across states...

This article exploits a differential increase in copyright under the UK Copyright Act of 1814 - in favor of books by dead authors - to examine the influence of longer copyrights on price. Difference-in-differences analyses, which compare changes in the price of books by dead and living authors,...

Our analysis seeks to understand the impact of changing allocations of property rights on investment in new firms. We focus on the Cartoon Network, et al. v. Cablevision decision in the U.S., which narrowed the protection enjoyed by content creators (e.g., movie studios) and gave greater rights...

This article develops a method for quantitatively tracking the agenda of the British Parliament--by which I mean the substantive topics on which Parliamentary debate was focused--from 1810-2005 using descriptions of 1.7 million Parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Hansard. This provides...

Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the invention of steam railways, newly-constructed spatially-disaggregated data...

Although it has been well established that financial volatility is related to news and macroeconomic shocks, there has been less emphasis on the importance of underlying economic and political stability. In this paper we study the behavior of consol returns since 1729 and identify a...