This paper examines the welfare effects of intellectual property protection, accounting for firms' optimal responses to legal environments and technological innovation. I examine firms' use of indirect price discrimination in response to U.S. copyright law, which effectively prevents direct...

The impact of patent pools on the rate and direction of technological change is an open question in both theoretical and empirical studies. Economic theory makes no unequivocal prediction. By contrast, empirical studies of patent pools, to date, have largely concluded that patent pools have been...

This paper studies how innovative firms manage their innovation portfolios after filing for Chapter 11 reorganization using three decades of data. We find that they sell off core (i.e., technologically critical and valuable), rather than peripheral, patents in bankruptcy. The selling pattern is...

We analyze the use of intellectual property (IP) by firms in Chile over the decade 1995-2005 as the then middle-income country experienced rapid economic growth of 4.7 percent per year. We use a novel dataset that contains a combination of detailed firm-level information from the annual...

We provide an empirical study of bundling in a supply chain, referred to as fullline forcing. We use an extensive dataset on contracts between video retailers and movie distributors to analyze the choices made on both sides of the market: which distributors offer full-line forcing contracts,...

New information technology has reduced marginal production and distribution costs of information goods to negligible levels and promises to revolutionize many industries. Unpaid copies of digital products can be as good as paid first-generation copies, and their availability can undermine the...

The growing use of on-line educational content and related video services has changed the way people access education, share knowledge, and possibly make life decisions. In this paper, we characterize how video content affects individual decision-making and willingness to share in the context of...

This paper proposes a new measure of technological obsolescence using detailed patent data. Using this measure, we present two sets of results. First, firms' technological obsolescence foreshadows substantially lower growth, productivity, and reallocation of capital. This finding applies mainly...

In this paper, we argue that actuarial valuation of annuity benefit streams is theoretically inconsistent with the assumption of pure lifecycle motives. Instead, we show that the simple discounted value of future benefits (ignoring the possibility of death) is often a good approximation to the...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction new goods, whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our...