Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile, other "defacto" IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has become more important because of the increasing closeness of...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization decisions of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. However, the manager can use her...

Support for R&D subsidies relies on empirical evidence that R&D "spills over" between firms. But firm performance is affected by two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative business stealing effects from R&D by product market rivals. We develop a...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that these have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wage inequality. If...

Metamorphic progress (productivity growth much faster than average) is often driven by Grilichesian inventions of methods of inventing. For hybrid seed corn, the enabling invention was double-cross hybridization yielding highly productive seed corn that was not self-propagating. Biotechnology...

We document a large increase in the cyclicality of the incomes of high-income households, coinciding with the rise in their share of aggregate income. In the U.S., since top income shares began to rise rapidly in the early 1980s, incomes of those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution...

This paper explores the role of knowledge flows and productivity growth by linking direct survey data on knowledge flows to firm-level data on TFP growth. Our data measure the information flows often considered important, especially by policy-makers, such as from within the firm and from...