U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to...

Despite much theorizing about the role of geographic concentration of employment in knowledge spillovers, local densities' role in promoting innovations has largely been unexamined. More often, studies have considered the effects of city size variables on innovative activity, although the role...

Economists, beginning with Alfred Marshall, have studied the significance of cities in the production and exploitation of information externalities that, today, we call knowledge spillovers. This paper presents robust evidence of those effects. We show that patent intensity—the per capita...

This paper examines the role local labor markets play in the production of innovations. The authors appeal to a labor market matching model (á la Berliant, Reed, and Wang 2004) to argue that in dense urban areas, workers are more selective in their matches and are therefore more productive....

The authors geocode a data set of patents and their citation counts, including citations from abroad. This allows them to examine both the quantity and quality of local inventions. They also refine their data on local academic R&D to explore effects from different fields of science and sources...

Rapid innovation is changing the array of financial services and payment options available to customers. To examine the driving forces behind the surge of innovation and the adoption of new technology, the Payment Cards Center and the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of...

This paper assesses the relative importance of two key drivers of mortgage default: negative equity and illiquidity. To do so, the authors combine loan-level mortgage data with detailed credit bureau information about the borrower's broader balance sheet. This gives them a direct way to measure...

The authors estimate the cost savings to the U.S. payment system resulting from implementing Check 21. This legislation initially permitted a paper substitute digital image of a check, and later an electronic digital image of a check, to be processed and presented for payment on a same-day...

To qualify for a patent, an invention must be new, useful, and nonobvious. This paper presents a model of sequential innovation in which industry structure is endogenous and a standard of patentability determines the proportion of all inventions that qualify for protection. There is a unique...

For many reasons, payment systems are subject to strong network effects; one of those is the necessity of interoperability among participants. This is often accomplished via standard-setting organizations. The goal of the Single European Payments Area (SEPA) is to establish modern cross-boarder...