Recent publications 

"The Welfare Effect of Gender-Inclusive Intellectual Property Creation,” Journal of Political Economy, 2025 (was NBER Working paper 30987, February 2023)

“Intellectual Property and Creative Machines”, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy, vol 4, 2025 (with Gaetan de Rassenfosse and Adam Jaffe, was National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 32698, July 2024.) 

“Extending Intellectual Property Research in Copyright: A New Dataset from the US Copyright Office,” (with Brent Lutes and Jeremy Watson), Strategy Science, 2025.

“The First Sale Doctrine and Public Library Provision of Print and Electronic Books,” (with Imke Reimers), The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024. 

Current research (drafts exist or are coming shortly)

Platform Power Struggle: Spotify and the Major Record Labels  (with Luis Aguiar and Axel Zeijen)

Digitization has facilitated the emergence of large distribution platforms downstream from traditionally powerful suppliers. Digital platforms can carry many suppliers’ products, test the products’ consumer appeal, and choose which products to promote, potentially shifting power from the suppliers to the platforms. We study these forces in the recorded music industry, which was traditionally dominated by a few “major” record labels distributing their products through fragmented radio stations and retailers. Now, the majors receive most of their promotion and distribution through platforms like Spotify, which carry millions of songs from both major and “independent” suppliers. We study Spotify’s use of playlists using data covering 2017-2020. First, Spotify used their expanded playlist capacity to test – and discover – proportionately more independent songs to promote on their playlists. Second, at least relative to major-label playlists, Spotify-operated playlists promoted new independent songs more than was indicated by their subsequent success. Third, placement on Spotify new-music playlists has a large causal impact on streams. The independent-label share of new-music promotion rose from 38 percent in late 2017 to 55 percent in early 2020, which helps to explain the reported decline in the share of Spotify royalty payments to major-label suppliers over the same period. 

Information and the welfare benefits from differentiated products (with Imke Reimers and Christoph Riedl)

Differentiated product consumption choices made without full information can lead to welfare losses from regret and missed opportunities, but data limitations have traditionally prevented their exploration. Using novel data on individual video game ownership, along with post-purchase usage and regret, we develop a tractable model of consumer choice among bundles based on hours of playtime relative to overall spending. Consumer omniscience could raise consumer surplus by more than the value of status quo expenditure; and it would reduce expenditure by half. Consumers heeding sophisticated, personalized predictions would obtain roughly 40 percent of these welfare benefits with a fifth less spending.

The Benefits of Gender-Inclusive Innovation: Evidence from US Patents

Despite concern about undiscovered Einsteins and lost Curies, there is little direct evidence of the value of innovations resulting from including more groups of people in innovative activity.  Between 1976 and 2020 the share of US technical PhDs granted to women rose from under a tenth to roughly a quarter, and the share of new US patents with half or more female inventors rose similarly.  How has this affected the value of innovation?  First, as the female-invented share of patents grows across vintages, the share of citations attracted by the female-invented patents grows nearly proportionally, suggesting that the additional female-inventor patents are valuable.  Second, additional patents appear to ``expand the market'' by attracting additional citations, rather than simply diverting citations from others, suggesting that additional female-inventor patents are valuable.  Third, growing numbers of female inventors and patents appear not to displace male inventors or patents.  Finally, I embed these mechanisms in an equilibrium model of demand for, and supply of, patents, which allows me to compare the welfare from counterfactual environments.  

The efficiency effects of platform ranking regulation (with Imke Reimers)

We develop a model of platform sales to investigate the welfare effects of platform ranking choices.  The commission arrangement, along with the platform’s ranking algorithm, determine the distribution of welfare among consumers, third-party sellers, and the platform.  Despite contemporary policy focus on ``self-preferencing,'' more fundamental aspects of platform ranking also have important effects on welfare.  First, platform ranking of products in pursuit of platform profit reduces consumer surplus and overall producer surplus; and because platform surplus rises, third-party surplus falls more sharply.  Second, a platform also selling its own products has two competing effects.  Platform products face no commissions, and their resulting lower prices raise welfare; but when the platform ranks products according to the platform’s proceeds, platform profits rise, effects on consumers are ambiguous, and third-party seller surplus falls substantially. Inherent data limitations prevent regulation from delivering efficient rankings; but we propose -- and explore -- feasible regulatory approaches that avoid substantial inefficiencies that would arise without regulation.

In Progress  (drafts on the way)

Automated translation and the global benefit of Wikipedia (with Kai Zhu and Luis Aguiar)

Wikipedia is perhaps the largest knowledge democratization project in history.  Yet, the site's content skews toward higher-income speakers of common languages such as English.   We use a combination of descriptive and structural approaches to quantifying the benefit of making all Wikipedia pages available in all languages.  The benefits would be large, and they would accrue especially to lower-income users speaking less common languages.  

GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps (with Janssen, Kesler, and Kummer) 

Old version linked above. A major revision is on the way. Here's the old abstract:

Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.