How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher...

How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? To answer this question, we examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Before the Internet, patent libraries gave inventors access to patent documents. We find that after patent library...

We study the causal impact of invalidating marginally valid patents during post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office on affected inventors' subsequent patenting. We exploit exogenous variation in invalidation by leveraging the participation of a patent's original examiner in the...

How do licensing and technology transfer influence the spread of General Purpose Technologies? To answer this question, we analyze the diffusion of the transistor, one of the most important technologies of our time. We show that the transistor diffusion and cross-technology spillovers increased...

We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

As skills of labor-market entrants are usually not directly observed by employers, individuals acquire skill signals. To study which signals are valued by employers, we simultaneously and independently randomize a broad range of skill signals on pairs of resumes of fictitious applicants among...

Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children\'s acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s...