We study the climate as a determinant of religious belief. People believe in the divine when religious authorities (the "church") can credibly intervene in nature on their behalf. We present a model in which nature sets the pattern of rainfall over time and the church chooses when optimally to...

We examine the impact of lost intellectual property protection on innovation, competition, acquisitions, lawsuits and employment agreements. We consider firms whose ability to protect intellectual property (IP) using patents is weakened following the Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank International...

Do large firms produce more valuable inventions, and if so, why? After confirming that large firms indeed produce more valuable inventions, we consider two possible sources: a superior ability to invent, or a superior ability to extract value from their inventions. We develop a simple model that...

Amidst the rise of remote work, we ask: what are the effects of proximity to coworkers? We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output. We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm, whose main campus has...

An important gap in most empirical studies of establishment-level productivity is the limited information about workers' characteristics and their tasks. Skill-adjusted labor input measures have been shown to be important for aggregate productivity measurement. Moreover, the theoretical...