Much of today’s software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

Software engineering is a field with strong geographic concentration, with Silicon Valley as the epitome of a tech cluster. Yet, most studies on the productivity effects of agglomerations measure innovation with patent data, thus capturing only a fraction of the industry's activity. With data...

How can teams organize for productive online collaboration? The coronavirus pandemic has led to a large and persistent shift toward remote work. Using fine-grained data from the world's largest platform for open-source software development, we find that the pandemic reduced the productivity of...

The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...