Crafting Intellectual Property Rights: Implications for Patent Assertion Entities, Litigation, and Innovation

By Josh Feng and Xavier Jaravel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase patents granted ...

Dynamic Noisy Signaling

By Sander Heinsalu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

This article studies costly signaling. The signaling effort is chosen in multiple periods and observed with noise. The signaler benefits from the belief of the market, not directly from the effort or the signal. Optimal signaling behavior in time-varying ...

Trading across Borders in Online Auctions

By Elena Krasnokutskaya, Christian Terwiesch, and Lucia Tiererova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

We invoke the insights from the auction literature to study trade in services using data from an online market for programming support. We find that the observed clustering of trade between countries can be rationalized through a model featuring endogenou...

Revealed Preferences for Diamond Goods

By Sam Cosaert

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2018

When consumers care not only for the quantity but also the value of a product, it could be rational to purchase products as they become more expensive. This study provides nonparametric—revealed preference—conditions to measure consumers' marg...

Report of the Editor: Journal of Economic Literature

By Steven Durlauf

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Report: Committee on Government Relations

By Phillip Swagel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Report of the Treasurer

By Peter L. Rousseau

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program

By Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Past research documents the persistence of positive impacts of early life interventions on noncognitive skills. We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introdu...

What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics?

By Stef Proost and Jacques-François Thisse

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2019

Spatial economics aims to explain why there are peaks and troughs in the spatial distribution of wealth and people, from the international and regional to the urban and local. The main task is to identify the microeconomic underpinnings of centripetal for...

Report: Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP)

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Noisy Memory and Over-Reaction to News

By Rava Azeredo da Silveira and Michael Woodford

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We propose a model of optimal decision-making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon's mutual information, as in models of rational inattention. We show that the model implies that both...

Empirical Bayes Estimation of Treatment Effects with Many A/B Tests: An Overview

By Eduardo M. Azevedo, Alex Deng, José L. Montiel Olea, and E. Glen Weyl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The use of large-scale experimentation to screen product innovations is increasingly common. This is a practical guide on how to use treatment effect estimates from a large number of experiments to improve estimates of the effects of each experiment. When...

Reconciling Data Access and Privacy: Building a Sustainable Model for the Future

By Katharine G. Abraham

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

An important factor in the government's ability to collect data from individuals and businesses is the promise that their information will be kept private. Given the explosion of other data increasingly available in electronic form, however, there is a gr...

Entertainment, Education, and Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence

By Abhijit Banerjee, Eliana La Ferrara, and Victor Orozco

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study attitudes towards domestic violence in a sample of young women and men exposed to the edutainment TV series MTV Shuga 3, which features a sub-plot on this theme, and in a sample that was not. We measure viewers' memory of the characters and ident...

Using Shifts in Deployment and Operations to Test for Racial Bias in Police Stops

By John M. MacDonald and Jeffrey Fagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We rely on a policy experiment in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to address the well-known problems of omitted variable bias and infra-marginality in traditional outcomes tests of racial bias in police stops. The NYPD designated specific areas...

New Evidence on the Cyclicality of Employer-to-Employer Flows from Canada

By Alice Nakamura, Emi Nakamura, Kyle Phong, and Jón Steinsson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents new estimates of gross worker flows for Canada for the sample period 1978 to 2016. We use administrative data from the Canadian Record of Employment in combination with the Canadian Labor Force Survey to estimate employer-to-employer f...

Does Getting Health Insurance Affect Women's Fertility? Evidence from the United Mine Workers' Health Insurance

By Erin Troland and Theodore F. Figinski

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Does health insurance affect fertility decisions? Fertility may increase if insurance lowers the costs of having a child. Fertility may decrease if children are more likely to survive into adulthood (quality-quantity tradeoff). We study a largely permanen...

Memory and Reference Prices: An Application to Rental Choice

By Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Loewenstein and Simonsohn (2006) found that movers across US cities anchor their rental choices to rents in the city of origin, but subsequently converge to comparable local households. We explain this finding using the authors' (2019) model of memory and...

Flow Origins of Labor Force Participation Fluctuations

By Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, Fatih Karahan, Gizem Koşar, and Ayşegül Şahin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We investigate the origins of cyclical and trend movements in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) using a three-state flow decomposition. The procyclicality of LFPR can be traced to cyclical flows between employment and unemployment. By contrast, la...

Toward the Next Generation of Scholarship: Challenges and Opportunities for Full Participation in PhD Training in Economics

By Thomas D. Jeitschko

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

A great advantage of our rigorous doctoral training is that as PhD economists we speak a common language that allows for efficient vetting and quick dissemination of ideas and insights. But what good is sophisticated grammar and a powerful vocabulary if t...