We develop a revealed preference approach to elicit science and engineering PhDs’ preferences over employment outcomes, exploiting cohort size variations. Depending on whether pecuniary and non-pecuniary rewards are sticky or not, increments in the PhDs’ cohort size decrease either the...

It has been argued that specialization within groups yields productivity gains. We evaluate this statement with a focus on groups of PhD students. Using an established technique in computer science, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we construct a novel measure of the dispersion of PhD...

We study the patent strategy of pharmaceutical firms in reaction to the threat of generic entry. Estimating difference-in-differences saturated with a host of fixed effects, we show that while these firms continue to produce patents after a drug is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration...

In November 2020, Apple announced a reduction in the royalty rate applied to small app developers from 30% to 15%. In March 2021, Google followed suit committing to a similar reform. We analyze the implications of these reforms for the distribution of app quality with a stylized model that...

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, founder of Raytheon and one-time engineering dean at MIT, delivered a report to the president of the United States that argued for the importance of public support for science, and the importance of science for the future of the nation. The report, Science: The Endless...

Open source is key to innovation, but we know little about how to incentivize it. In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in May 2019 and enabled...

Europe is perceived to be lagging behind the US in converting its academic results into economic outcomes. Using new survey data on European and US Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), we find that differences in academic research, TTO staff and experience explain to a great extent the gap...

This paper seeks to add an economic contribution to the current debate on using university licensing contracts to improve access to medicines in developing countries. We build a simple model in which we have a university licensing out an academic invention to a profit-maximizing pharmaceutical...