Many scholars have wrestled with what I call the “first-order question” in patent law: What policies should we adopt to promote innovation? This article grapples with the second-order question: What policies should we adopt to promote innovation about promoting innovation? I argue that...

We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India's 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab managers aligned with the...

U.S. intellectual property law is firmly rooted in utilitarian principles. Copyright law is viewed as a means to give proper monetary incentives to authors for their creative effort. Many European copyright systems pursue additional goals: Authors have the right to be named as author, to control...

Early studies often found that offering economic incentives for undertaking prosocial and intrinsically motivated activities can crowd out motivation to perform these activities. More recent work highlights nuanced and important features related to whether crowding out (or substitution) is...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now in most industries for most potential users, appropriating...

In the policy debate, intellectual property is often justified by what seems to be a straightforward argument: if innovators are not protected against others appropriating their ideas, incentives for innovation are suboptimally low. Now in most industries for most potential users, appropriating...

We establish the importance of physical capital in knowledge production. To this end, we exploit adverse events (explosions, fires, floods, etc.) at research institutions as exogenous physical capital shocks. Scientists experience a substantial and persistent reduction in research output if they...

Established firms accumulate a significant body of knowledge, expertise and capabilities that are often secondary to their central revenue generating activities. How do they leverage this expertise in non-core technology into future value creation opportunities? In this paper we examine an...

When discussing search in patent law, everyone considers the problem in terms of producers looking for patentees. But search is reciprocal. In designing a patent system, we can have producers look for patentees, or patentees look for producers. Either will result in the ex ante negotiation that...