Research

This paper examines the effect of the expiry of recording copyright on the supply of music—in the form of rereleases, availability on streaming platforms, and concert performances—by artists popular in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. We find that recording copyright expiry has different effects on a song’s availability in different distribution channels. The lapsing of copyright leads to a large increase in the number of rereleases in physical formats, holding constant artist, age, and year fixed effects. However, when a song’s original recording copyright expires, it becomes less likely to be performed in concert. Moreover, copyright status is not associated with differences in availability on the digital streaming platform Spotify. These results show that copyright expiry has nuanced effects on availability and can lead to different and even opposite effects on availability of a product across different distribution channels. They also show that within the context of digital distribution, the impact of copyright on availability differs based on the business model of a platform.

Canada’s slow productivity growth rate relative to peer countries has been the focus of considerable attention among academics and policymakers. In contrast to the relatively flat trajectory for total factor productivity, Canada’s production of patents has grown considerably in the last three decades. In this article, we examine changes in Canadian patenting over the past 30 years, with a view to understanding this “patent productivity paradox”: slower productivity growth than might be expected given significant increases in patenting. We draw on recent literature on patents as a measure of innovation as well as literature on the relationship between patents and productivity to study this paradox. We propose several explanations for the disconnect between TFP growth and patenting and examine the evidence. We find that the weaker relationship between productivity and patenting in Canada is not explained by the relative rate of invention in information and communications technology, nor by lower invention quality. However, we find suggestive evidence that foreign ownership of patents and inventor migration help to explain the weaker relationship between productivity and patenting in Canada.

Should organizations concentrate scarce resources among a few knowledge workers or distribute them more broadly? The answer to this question depends on whether additional resources enable more ambitious work or simply allow lower-priority projects to move forward. We examine how the direction of innovative output changes as resource constraints are relaxed in the context of high-performance computing (HPC), a critical input to modern scientific research. Using data from XSEDE, an NSF-funded program that allocates supercomputing resources to researchers, we leverage system-wide capacity constraints to identify the causal impact of variation in resource constraints on scientific output. We find that relaxing constraints increases the number of publications and shifts the direction of research. Scientists pursue less popular and newer topics, explore areas beyond their prior expertise, and broaden the scope of their work. However, these directional shifts are associated with fewer citations, suggesting a trade-off between frontier-expanding innovation and impact. Our findings show that allocation strategies shape not just the volume but the trajectory of innovation, with direct implications for R&D managers and policymakers supporting innovation under resource constraints.

This paper studies how startup acquisitions impact the positioning of rival startups. On one hand, the acquisition of a startup may put rivals at a competitive disadvantage, incentivizing positioning away from the acquired firm. On the other hand, a startup acquisition may send positive signals of future demand on the acquisition or product market, incentivizing rivals to position closer to the acquired firm. I compile a novel dataset of historical snapshots of startup websites over time and construct a measure of distance between startups’ positions on the product market. Applying a matched difference-in-differences framework, I find that following the acquisition of a rival, startups move away from the acquired rival (differentiate themselves), on average. The effect is stronger for startups that have not raised venture capital funding and in older markets. These findings highlight the role of the M&A market in shaping the direction of entrepreneurial innovation, with implications for entrepreneurial strategy and antitrust policy.

Consistently measuring the value of patents across a wide range of technologies and contexts has long been a challenge for technology managers and researchers. In this context, stock market-based valuations have recently become popular. We propose that such valuations are best understood as the expected value of the intellectual property right at grant, factoring in technological uncertainty and the degree to which the patent will facilitate appropriation of eventual commercial value. We empirically demonstrate the role of uncertainty and appropriation in the context of pharmaceutical patenting and among AI patents. First, we find that stock market abnormal returns indicate that patents issued later in the drug-development process are more valuable, even though these "secondary"' patents are generally seen as weaker than the more highly cited patents covering a new molecule. Consistent with this, we show that the valuation of AI patents increases strongly after the viability of a certain technology is demonstrated publicly. Second, in the context of pharmaceuticals, we show that a firm's ability to capture value from a given patent is associated with its stock market return. We find valuation premia for secondary patents that extend the monopoly-life of a drug, and for some new-use and continuation patents.