We examine the relationship between the adoption of EMR and hospital operating costs. We first identify a puzzle that has been seen in prior studies: Adoption of EMR is associated with a slight cost increase. We draw on the literature on IT and productivity to demonstrate that the average effect...

This paper examines the relationship between basic and applied pharmaceutical research. The authors focus on three stages of R&D: government-funded basic research; publication in medical journals; and industry-funded applied R&D. They estimate that a one percent increase in basic research in a...

Abstract Knowledge spillovers in Open Source Software (OSS) can occur via two channels: In the first channel, programmers take knowledge and experience gained from one OSS project they work on and employ it in another OSS project they work on. In the second channel, programmers reuse software...

Abstract A large literature has used patent data to measure knowledge spillovers across inventions but few papers have explicitly measured the impact of the collaboration networks formed by inventors on the quality of invention. This paper develops a method to measure the impact of collaboration...

Can indirect network effects lead to adoption externalities? If so, when? We show that in markets where consumption benefits arise from hardware/software systems, adoption externalities will occur when there are (i) increasing returns to scale in the production of software, (ii) free entry in...

To understand the relationship between information flows and white-collar output, we collected unique data on email communications to study the network connecting individuals in a management recruiting firm. We also gathered data on revenues and contracts at the individual level. Our empirical...