The question of protecting intellectual property rights by academic inventors was never seriously contemplated until the introduction of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 in the US. The Act allowed universities to retain patent rights over inventions arising out of federally-funded research and to...

In 2012, the Brazilian government passed a law that mandated all federal higher education institutions to implement a 50 percent admission quota for historically disadvantaged students. I study the implications of this regulation on the academic performance of non-targeted students....

We use the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study which attributes characterize a top-scoring (four-star) publication in Economics and Econometrics. We frame the analysis as a classification problem and, using information in official documents, derive conditions to infer the...

Using a rich set of administrative data, we study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the transition to tertiary education for students with disabilities in Chile. Enrollment rates in primary and secondary education in Chile differ by less than 2 percentage points for students with or without...

In this paper, we empirically investigate a channel through which social capital may improve economic wellbeing and the functioning of institutions: political accountability. The main idea is that voters who share norms of generalized morality demand higher standards of behavior on their elected...