We investigate how international patent activity enables firms from emerging economies to thrive in the global marketplace. We match Chinese customs data to US patent records, and leverage the quasi-random assignment of USPTO patent examiners to identify the causal effect of a US patent grant on...

If bidders are uncertain whether the auctioneer sticks to the announced reserve, some bidders respond by strategic non-participation, speculating that the auctioneer may revoke the reserve. However, the reserve inadvertently signals the auctioneer's type, which drives a unique separating and a...

Mean-preserving contractions are critical for studying Bayesian models of information design. We introduce the class of bi-pooling policies, and the class of bi-pooling distributions as their induced distributions over posteriors. We show that every extreme point in the set of all...