reference library

Intellectual property (IP) conflict of laws issues in disputes between private parties arise for a variety of reasons. Most infringe the plaintiff’s intellectual property rights in countries X, Y, and…
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As the America Invents Act (AIA) turns 10, patent students across the country may ask: if the law is already a decade old, why am I spending so much time…
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Branded drug prices command considerable attention in the United States yet defining a drug’s price is not straightforward because they vary substantially across settings. We link branded drug prices across…
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In this paper we analyse whether firms that are concerned with corporate social responsibility (CSR) are willing to disclose their R&D knowledge for free. Assuming strategic R&D with endogenous spillovers…
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This article presents a brief update through 2019 of the author’s previous quantitative study of all reported federal court opinions that applied the Copyright Act’s four-factor test for copyright fair…
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We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent…
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Personal appearance professionals in the United States — such as barbers, cosmetologists, and manicurists — must typically be licensed. These licensing requirements vary from state to state, and they are…
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Corporate bond markets proved remarkably resilient against a sharp contraction caused by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. We document three important findings: (1) bond issuance increased immediately when the contraction hit,…
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The 2008 financial crisis exposed a longstanding problem in financial regulation: traditional regulatory strategies tend to be procyclical. That is, regulatory tools—most notably, bank capital requirements—incentivize excessive credit growth during…
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The mortgage market experienced a historic boom in 2020, with record origination volumes and lender profits. While many borrowers benefited from record-low mortgage rates, the pass-through of lower rates to…
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This paper studies how innovative firms manage their innovation portfolios after filing for Chapter 11 reorganization using three decades of data. We find that they sell off core (i.e., technologically…
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The second half of the twentieth century saw large-scale suburbanization in the United States, with the median share of residents who work in the same county where they live falling…
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How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into…
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We show how characterizing optimal patent policy for the pharmaceutical industry only requires information about generic producers’ responses to changes in the effective duration and scope of new drug patents….
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We study the long-run outcomes associated with hedge funds’ compensation structure. Over a 22-year period, the aggregate effective incentive fee rate is 2.5 times the average contractual rate (i.e., around…
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Local control of land-use regulation creates a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) problem that can suppress housing construction, contributing to rising prices and potentially slowing economic growth. I study how increased local control…
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated California’s housing crisis by heightening social and economic inequalities, with disparate impact on those unable to perform their jobs. The strong likelihood of a prolonged…
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We measure popular sentiment toward finance using a computational linguistics approach applied to millions of books published in eight countries over hundreds of years. We document persistent differences in finance…
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A pandemic calls for large-scale action across national and international innovation systems in order to mobilize resources for developing and manufacturing crisis-critical products efficiently and in the huge quantities needed….
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Is government guiding the invisible hand at the top of the labor market? We study this question among physicians, the most common occupation among the top one percent of income…
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This report gives an overview of findings from the third wave of data collection for the After the JD Study of Lawyers’ Careers, which we refer to in this report…
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The COVID‐19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the world economy as shelter‐in‐place regulations forced individuals to stay at and work from home. Brick and mortar testing centers, whether run as part…
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There are two prevailing theories of borrower default: strategic default—when debt is too high relative to the value of the house—and adverse life events—such that the monthly payment is too…
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We investigate the impact on firms of joining the S&P 500 index from 1997 to 2017. We find that the positive announcement effect on the stock price of index inclusion…
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The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (commonly known as Dodd-Frank), which was intended to address perceived problems in the financial system and prevent future crises, is the…
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In this work, we attempt to provide a comprehensive granular account of the pace of technological change. More specifically, we survey estimated yearly performance improvement rates for nearly all definable…
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Commercial publishing houses continue to make unbounded profits while exploiting the free labour of researchers through peer review. If publishers are to be compensated financially for the value that they…
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Direct public support for business R&D is a well-established remedy to market failures, yet empirical evidence on its effectiveness yields conflicting results. The paper investigates the impact of the first…
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We show that occupational licensing has significant negative effects on labor market fluidity defined as cross-occupation mobility. Using a balanced panel of workers constructed from the CPS and SIPP data,…
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We analyze the determinants and the long-run consequences of government interventions in the eurozone banking sector during the 2008/09 financial crisis. Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we document that…
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Bank holding companies (BHCs) can be complex organizations, conducting multiple lines of business through many distinct legal entities and across a range of geographies. While such complexity raises the costs…
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Creativity and innovation are flourishing in the entertainment industries. But the growing threat of streaming piracy presents a major challenge to the continued vitality of legitimate online video services like…
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The pharmaceutical industry is facing substantial criticism from many directions, including financial barriers to access to drugs in both developed and developing countries, high profits, spending on advertising and marketing,…
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Delays in market entry of generic drugs are common. This study sought to identify the prevalence of delayed entry, the reasons for the delays, and the delays’ effects on Medicaid…
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The importance of new technologies derives from the fact that they spread across many different users and uses, as well as different geographic regions. The diffusion of technological improvements, across…
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Copyright law, which promotes the creation of cultural and artistic works by protecting these works from being copied, excuses infringement that is deemed to be a fair use. Whether an…
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This paper studies how insurance coverage policies affect incentives for pharmaceutical innovation. In the United States, the majority of drugs are sold to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), which administer prescription…
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Delays in market entry of generic drugs are common. This study sought to identify the prevalence of delayed entry, the reasons for the delays, and the delays’ effects on Medicaid…
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We quantify the impact of bank market power on monetary policy transmission through banks to borrowers. We estimate a dynamic banking model in which monetary policy affects imperfectly competitive banks’…
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In March of 2020, banks faced the largest increase in liquidity demands ever observed. Firms drew funds on a massive scale from pre-existing credit lines and loan commitments in anticipation…
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Recently, state governments have begun to claim a copyright interest in their official published codes of law, in particular arguing that ancillary materials such as annotations to the statutory text…
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An entrepreneur finances her project via crowdfunding. She chooses a funding mechanism (fixed or flexible), a price, and a funding goal. Under fixed funding, money is refunded if the goal…
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This paper examines the U.S. government’s intramural research and development efforts over a 40-year period, drawing together multiple human capital, government spending, and patent datasets. The U.S. Federal Government innovates…
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I survey some recent research on the role of patents in encouraging innovation and growth in developing economies, beginning with a brief history of international patent systems and facts about…
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Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk…
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Brand-name pharmaceutical companies often file lawsuits against generic drug manufacturers that challenge the monopoly status of patent-protected drugs. Institutional horizontal shareholdings, measured by the generic shareholders’ ownership in the brand-name…
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Many economics journals have recently invested in efforts to archive and curate research data and promote reproducible research. The economics profession has focused relatively less attention on what types of…
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Patents and other intellectual property (IP) have grown in relative importance in investments and market capitalizations of public firms (e.g., Corrado and Hulten 2010). This paper illustrates the construction of…
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Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates…
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Standard-essential patents (SEPs) have become a key element of technical coordination in standard-setting organizations. Yet, in many cases, it remains unclear whether a declared SEP is truly standard-essential. To date,…
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In 2004, Canada changed the eligibility rules for its Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) tax credit, which provides tax incentives for R&D conducted by small private firms. Difference-in-difference estimates…
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Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of…
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This chapter provides an overview of grant funding as an innovation policy tool aimed at both practitioners and science policy scholars. We first discuss how grants relate to other contractual…
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This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights – as a result of the timing of Napoléon’s military victories in Italy – to examine the effects of copyrights…
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Innovation is important for firm performance and broader economic growth. But breakthrough innovations necessarily require greater risk-taking than more incremental approaches. To understand how managers respond to uncertainty when making…
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Whenever policymakers consider approaches to reduce drug spending, the pharmaceutical industry sings a familiar refrain— any reduction in drug manufacturer revenues will cause investment to wither, depriving manufacturers of the…
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As yet another coronavirus spreads around the globe, scientists are once again trying to develop new treatments and vaccines. Much remains unknown about this family of viruses. But we know…
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Understanding the profitability of pharmaceutical companies is essential to formulating evidence-based policies to reduce drug costs while maintaining the industry’s ability to innovate and provide essential medicines. This cross-sectional study…
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The mean cost of developing a new drug has been the subject of debate, with recent estimates ranging from $314 million to $2.8 billion. Data were analyzed on new therapeutic…
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Social and policy interest in intellectual property, and patents, in particular, is growing. This is reflected in the rise of scholarly inquiry on the topic beyond the legal community, including…
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Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance…
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We explore how firms grow by adding products. In contrast to most earlier work on the topic, our conceptual and empirical framework allows for separate treatment of product innovation (vertical…
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This Article argues that U.S. copyright law provides a competitive advantage in the global race for innovation policy because it permits researchers to conduct computational analysis — text and data…
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We analyze wartime prosthetic device patents to investigate how procurement policy affects the cost, quality, and quantity of medical innovation. Analyzing whether inventions emphasize cost and/or quality requires generating new…
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The negotiations of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) (2006-2008), undertaken by the Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO), were the result…
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People living in rural areas have worse health outcomes than their urban counterparts do. Understanding what factors account for this could inform policy interventions for reducing rural-urban disparities in health….
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Following the 2008 financial crisis (which occurred during the Great Recession that began in December 2007), businesses and corporations experienced substantial difficulty in accessing credit required to maintain operations at…
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The United States spends more on health care than any other country, with costs approaching 18% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Prior studies estimated that approximately 30% of health…
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This study examines the effect of policy uncertainty on corporate debt maturity structure. We find that elevated levels of policy uncertainty lead firms to shorten debt maturity, indicating that firms…
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This paper compares the out-of-sample predictive performance of different early warning models for systemic banking crises using a sample of advanced economies covering the past 45 years. We compare a…
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Market share of conforming-size, home purchase mortgage originations has steadily and substantially shifted from banking institutions to nonbank lenders over recent years. In 2017, nonbanks originated more than 1.8 million…
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The economic valuation of intellectual property is an area with which IP professionals still need to fully come to grips with. In the context of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), the…
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Within the 65-and-over age group, most recent income gains have gone to the highest earners, and the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. Ensuring…
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We examine the cleansing effect of financial crises via their contribution to the exit of inefficient US commercial banks from 1984 to 2013. We find a larger increase in the…
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Recent evidence suggests an increasing risk of natural disasters of the magnitude of hurricane Katrina and Sandy. Concurrently, the number and volume of flood insurance policies has been declining since…
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We study the market for ratings agencies in the commercial mortgage backed securities sector leading up to and including the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Using a structural model adapted from…
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As regions across the United States are experiencing high and rising house prices, inclusionary zoning is increasing in popularity as a tool to increase the availability of affordable housing for…
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The 2008 crisis created a need to rethink many aspects of economic theory, including the role of public intervention in the economy. On this issue, we explore the Barro-Ricardo equivalence,…
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A series of statutory provisions codified at Title 12 of the U.S. Code empower special government officials known as supervisors to examine banks and tell bankers what to do, not…
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Brokers continue to play a critical role in intermediating institutional stock market transactions. More than half of all institutional investor order flow is still executed by high-touch (non-electronic) brokers. Despite…
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Pre-crisis estimates of the jumbo-conforming spread, utilizing a variety of methodologies, ranged from 10 to 25 basis points. In the post-crisis period, this spread has decreased and has been negative…
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In four cases handed down between 2010 and 2014, the Supreme Court articulated a new two-step patent eligibility test that drastically reduced the scope of patent protection for software inventions….
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In most contexts, making up data is forbidden – considered fraudulent, even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data, and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments…
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This paper exploits variation in the adoption of copyright laws – due to idiosyncratic variation in the timing of Napoléon’s military victories – to investigate the causal effects of copyright…
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We propose a contingent clawback bond (COCLA) as an alternative source of contingent convertible capital (CoCo). We develop a utility maximization model in which a bank manager faces the following…
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Over the last decade, macroprudential policy has made important advances and become more widely used. We have a better understanding of its goals and tools, and are accumulating evidence that…
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This article deals with a period of transition for most patent systems in Europe and North America, from instruments of royal prerogative power to specialized and statute-based weapons of capitalist…
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This paper describes the results of an inquiry into appropriability conditions in more than one hundred manufacturing industries. We discuss how this information has been and might be used to…
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A defining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the U.S. has…
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American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American…
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High and continually increasing pharmaceutical drug spending is a major health and health policy concern in the United States.This economic evaluation of drug prices focuses on 49 top-selling brand-name medications…
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Inclusionary zoning (IZ) has become an increasingly popular tool for providing affordable housing in an economically integrative manner. IZ policies typically require developers to set aside a proportion of units…
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Many local governments are adopting inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a means of producing affordable housing without direct public subsidies. In this paper, we use panel data on IZ in the…
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Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as…
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Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the “housing as opportunity” school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations…
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In keeping with our mandate to provide advice on the broad range of policy issues raised by the development and use of genetic technologies as well as our charge to…
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Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright. A…
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We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the United Kingdom and a new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house…
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This paper shows that a macro model with segmented financial markets can generate sizable movements in housing prices in response to changes in credit conditions. We establish theoretically that reductions…
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Liquidity shocks transmitted through interbank connections contributed to bank distress during the Great Depression. New data on interbank connections reveal that banks were much more likely to close when their…
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