Location as an Asset
The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs. We argue that it is useful to conceptualize the location choice of individuals as a decision to [...]
A Survey of Empirical Evidence on Patents and Innovation
This report surveys the empirical literature from economics and related fields on patents and innovation. In particular, it reviews and synthesizes the empirical evidence on patents and first-generation innovation, the [...]
Do Minimum-Lot-Size Regulations Limit Housing Supply in Texas?
With a relatively light regulatory hand on land use, the Texas suburbs are more responsive to market forces than most metro areas. Even so, some of their single-family lots are [...]
Occupational Licensing and the Limits of Public Choice Theory
Public choice theory has long been the dominant lens through which economists and other scholars have viewed occupational licensing. According to the public choice account, practitioners favor licensing because they [...]
Nonbank Lending
We provide novel systematic evidence on the extent and terms of direct lending by nonbank financial institutions, and explore whether banks are still special in lending to informationally opaque firms. [...]
Brief of Amici Curiae Electronic Frontier Foundation and R Street Institute in Support of Petitioner, Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. v. Illumina, Inc.
The Federal Circuit has departed from the fundamental principle of the patent system: an invention must be new to be patentable. Instead, it held that second comers may receive the [...]
Alternative Asset Fees, Returns and Volatility of State Pension Funds: A Case Study of the New Jersey Pension Fund
This case study provides new information about alternative asset fees to many institutional investors by tapping a relatively unknown data source: state pension fund annual reports. Examining the few state [...]
The Impact of Occupational Licensing Requirements in D.C.
The District of Columbia has many factors in its favor making it attractive to workers: high average wages, a variety of employer benefits, strong worker protections, and relatively short commute [...]
Measuring the Impact of Household Innovation using Administrative Data
We link USPTO patent data to U.S. Census Bureau administrative records on individuals and firms. The combined dataset provides us with a directory of patenting household inventors as well as [...]
Hidden Loan Losses, Moral Hazard and Financial Crises
This paper introduces two methods of hiding loan losses and analyzes how they affect a bank's loan interest income, payments on deposits, liquidity and moral hazard. The analysis reveals that [...]