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...

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...

This paper assesses whether delays in obtaining permanent residency status can explain recent declines in the share of Chinese and Indian PhD graduates from US STEM programs who remain in the US after their studies. We find that newly-binding limits on permanent visas for those from China and...

The impact of stronger intellectual property rights in the software industry is controversial. One means by which patents can affect technical change, industry dynamics, and ultimately welfare, is through their role in stimulating or stifling entry by new ventures. Patents can block entry, or...

To what extent are firms kept out of a market by patents covering related technologies? Do patents held by potential entrants make it easier to enter markets? We estimate the empirical relationship between market entry and patents for 27 narrowly defined categories of software products during...

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...

The establishment and growth of industrial research laboratories is one of the key organizational innovations affecting technological progress in the United States in the 20th century. In this paper, we investigate the rise of industrial research laboratories in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry...

What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to answer with modern data: 1) Does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? And 2)...

Patent pools, which allow competing firms to combine their patents, have emerged as a prominent mechanism to resolve litigation when multiple firms own patents for the same technology. This paper takes advantage of a window of regulatory tolerance under the New Deal to investigate the effects of...

Patent pools allow a group of firms to combine their patents as if they were a single firm. Theoretical models predict that pools encourage innovation in pool technologies, albeit at the cost of innovation in substitutes. Empirical evidence is scarce because modern pools are too recent to allow...