The role played by the patent system as an innovation incentive is at the center of an importantcurrent debate. The relevance of the patent system for the development of high-tech industries hasbeen put into question. This paper adds to the prior evidence by looking at the relationship...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the diffusion of new technologies and the decentralization of firms. Centralized control relies on the information of the principal, which we equate with publicly available information. Decentralized control, on the other hand, delegates authority to...

The role played by the patent system as an innovation incentive is at the center of an important current debate. The relevance of the patent system for the development of high-tech industries has been put into question. This paper adds to the prior evidence by looking at the relationship between...

We study the behavior of firms as importers using a micro dataset of French manufacturing firms. We focus on firms' allocation of expenditure across different inputs and different supplying countries (varieties) of each input. We consider a general framework that nests the available models of...

Trade in intermediate inputs raises firm productivity as it enables producers to access both better and novel inputs of production. The question is: by how much? This paper develops a framework to answer this question. We explicitly allow for (i) firms sourcing from multiple countries, (ii)...

A major empirical challenge in economics is to identify how regulations (such as firing costs) affect economic efficiency. Almost all countries have regulations that increase costs when firms cross a discrete size threshold. We show how these size-contingent regulations can be used to identify...

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....

This paper examines whether patenting increases the private incentives to innovate in manufacturing. To study this issue, we build a model in which the value of an innovation depends both on the type of innovation implemented (product, process) and on the existence of a patent protection or not....

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. Decentralized control, on the...