Social learning plays a limited role in determining movie sales momentum according to recent research by Gilchrist and Sands (2016), who instead emphasize the importance of network externalities. Narrow replication of their robustness test for social learning, which compares sales momentum for...

This paper studies a novel explanation for observed productivity differences among firms in the same industry. Competition is allowed to affect labor productivity, so that heterogeneity in competition affects the demand for skilled labor, leading to differences in firm performance. This...

A socially optimal structure of application and renewal fees for patents would encourage the maximal number of applications while reducing effective patent length. We find, however, that when patent offices are required to be self-funding, resource constraints can distort this fee structure....

Patent pools allow competing firms to combine their patents and license them as a package to outside firms. Regulators today favor pools that license their patents freely to outside firms, making it difficult to observe the unconstrained licensing strategies of patent pools. This paper takes...