Economists, legal scholars and policy makers are concerned about the impact of patent litigation on the rate and direction of US innovation and on the functioning of the US intellectual property system. At this time, however, there is no reliable, comprehensive, free and publicly accessible...

A conspiracy to conceal information is a central allegation in prominent mass tort claims totaling billions of dollars. Analysis of such claims can be informed by evaluating firms' economic incentives to conceal substantive information. We show that these incentives — and thus the potential...

The working paper uses patent data to explore the levels and trends in technological innovations in U.S. mineral mining with a particular focus on safety and health. We present four types of patent-based evidence on the impact of the 2006 MINER Act. While this evidence does not include a...

The terms-of-trade theory suggests that governments engage in trade negotiations with their trade partners in an effort to escape from a terms-of-trade prisoner's dilemma by mutually internalizing externalities that they impose on each other. In this paper, I use predictions of the...