We study the relationship between patents and actual product innovation in the market, and how this relationship varies with firms' market share. We use textual analysis to create a new data set that links patents to products of firms in the consumer goods sector. We find that patent filings are...

The last decades have seen large improvements in digital advertising technology that allowed firms to better target specific consumer tastes. This research studies the relationship among digital advertising, the rise of varieties, and economic welfare. We develop a model of advertising and...

This paper contributes to the discussion about the performance and efficiency of Portuguese secondary schools, using the stochastic production frontier analysis. We discuss the impact of school variables and the environment on output (measured by the average national examination scores), as...

We use detailed product- and firm-level data to study the sources of innovation and the patterns of productivity growth over the period from 2007 to 2013. We document several new facts on product reallocation. First, every quarter around 8 percent of products are reallocated in the economy, and...

We exploit detailed product- and firm-level data for the consumer goods industry and we document that the sales of individual products decline at a steady pace throughout most of their life cycles. This pattern is common across heterogenous types of products and is mostly due to declines in...

Firms are born small, grow, and die. We investigate an explanation for this process based on frictions in the accumulation of customers, across and within markets segmented by geography. We use matched retail scanner and TV advertising data on consumer food to show that entrants grow both by...