A large portion of innovators do not patent their inventions. This is a relative puzzle since innovators are often perceived to be at the mercy of imitators in the absence of legal protection. In practice, innovators however invest actively in making their products technologically hard to...

Markets for technology can promote innovation by allowing for division of labor in research and development. Some firms may specialize in the discovery of ideas, while others have a comparative advantage in later stages of development and marketing. However, these gains depend on the timing of...

Though a large literature on the determinants of turnout has ourished, there is scant evidence on the causal impact of turnout on policies implemented in practice. Using data on French municipalities and instrumental variables for turnout based on temperature and inuenza variations, we show that...

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We study the problem of an inventor who brings to the market an innovation that can be legally copied. Imitators may `enter' the market by copying the innovation at a cost or by buying from the inventor the knowledge necessary to reproduce and use the invention. The possibility of contracting...

Exclusive patents sacrifice product competition to provide firms incentives to innovate. We characterize an alternative mechanism whereby later inventors are allowed to share the patent if they discover within a certain time period of the first inventor. These runner-up patents increase social...

We study the problem of an inventor who brings to the market an innovation that can be legally copied. Imitators may 'enter' the market by copying the innovation at a cost or by buying from the inventor the knowledge necessary to reproduce and use the invention. The possibility of contracting...

In situations where a biased sender provides verifiable information to a receiver, I study how strategic reporting affects the incentives to search for information. Research provides series of signals that can be used selectively in reporting. I show that the sender is strictly worse off when...

We examine the appropriability problem of an inventor who brings to the market a successful innovation that can be legally copied. We study this problem in a dynamic model in which imitators can “enter” the market either by copying the invention at a cost or by buying knowledge (a license)...