We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. Digitization has expanded consumption opportunities by giving consumers access to the "long tail" of existing products, rather than simply...

Convergence in per capita income across countries turns on whether technological knowledge spillover are global or local. This paper estimates the amount of spillover from R&D expenditures in major industrialized countries on a geographic basis. A new data set is used which encompasses most of...

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...

In this paper we examine the importance of local spillovers such as network externalities and learning from others in the diffusion of home computers using data on 110,000 U.S. households in 1997. Controlling for many individual characteristics, we find that people are more likely to buy their...

It may be advantageous to provide a variety of kinds of patent protection to heterogenous innovations. Innovations which benefit society largely through their use as building blocks to future inventions may require a different scope of protection in order to be encouraged. We model the problem...

We examine the role of network effects in the demand for pharmaceuticals at both the brand level and for a therapeutic class of drugs. These effects emerge when use of a drug by others conveys information about its efficacy and safety to patients and physicians. This can lead to herd behavior...

This paper examines the evidence on technology diffusion through trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly research and development (R&D) investments, employing imported intermediates implies an implicit sharing of the technology that was...

How does the publication of patents affect innovation? We answer this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment--the passage of the American Inventor's Protection Act of 1999 (AIPA)--that accelerated the public disclosure of most U.S. patents by two years. We obtain causal...

This paper studies the role and incidence of entry preemption strategic motives on the dynamics of new industries, while providing an empirical test for entry preemption, and quantifying its impact on market structure. The empirical context is the evolution of the U.S. drive-in theater market...

This paper identifies and quantifies major determinants of future electric vehicle (EV) demand in order to inform widely-held aspirations for market growth. Our model compares three channels that will affect EV market share in the United States from 2020-2035: intrinsic (no-subsidy) EV demand...