The Impact of Intellectual Property Rights on Innovation and Follow-on Development: Evidence From the Bayh-Dole Act (link)
Job Market Paper
Intellectual property rights (IPR) are thought to promote innovation, but inhibit follow-on development by restricting the dissemination of new ideas across firms. Exploiting a change in patent policy for U.S. government-sponsored inventions (1980 Bayh-Dole Act), I find that strengthening IPR increases innovation, follow-on development, and cross-firm diffusion of ideas. I use these estimates to calibrate a Schumpeterian growth model featuring a two-stage R&D process and endogenous knowledge diffusion. IPR raises R&D intensity by strengthening appropriation and increases knowledge diffusion by enabling innovators to shield licensees from competition. A quantitative analysis suggests that IPR increase aggregate welfare, although a compulsory licensing policy sometimes better balances innovation incentives with broader diffusion. These results highlight trade-offs in patent policy and the government's ability to leverage R&D funding to promote dissemination and development of ideas.
Workshops and Conferences: Junior Research Day - QMUL, London (2025); QMUL PhD Workshop - QMUL, London (2025)
Public R&D Spillovers and Growth: Specialization vs Integration (link)
Work-in-progress
The traditional model of public R&D investment emphasizes a division of labor: the public sector does basic research, whose knowledge private firms commercialize through applied research. This paper challenges that framework by developing an endogenous growth model in which public labs and private firms perform complementary basic and applied research and generate knowledge spillovers that differ in efficiency. Public R&D delivers gains through three channels: higher rates of basic research that generate compounding spillover effects, higher efficiency of applied spillovers to the private sector, and higher quality applied spillovers stemming from complementary R&D investments. This paper documents conditions for sectoral specialization. When calibrated to U.S. data and stylized facts on public versus private R&D and innovation quality, the model implies public R&D raises productivity but crowds out private effort. The historical decline in public applied R&D explains the rise in private R&D and accounts for one-third of the post-1960s growth slowdown. Integrating public basic research with more applied research is therefore crucial to restoring economic growth.
Workshops and Conferences: Junior Research Day - Collège de France, Paris (2023); WICK - Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin (2023); EPOC - Ca’Foscari University, Venice (2024)
Endogenous Markups and Growth in Oligopoly (link)
Work-in-progress
There is a growing interest in understanding how market concentration affects market power. However, existing models of oligopoly either assume market power is exogenous, are less tractable, or rely on imprecise market definitions to inform the role of concentration. This paper develops a tractable model of firm dynamics in an oligopolistic setting where market power is endogenous, and the role of concentration is informed through the full shape of the equilibrium markup distribution. Firms compete through Bayesian Bertrand competition, generating markups as a function of two key statistics: (i) productivity dispersion and (ii) the number of competing firms. Markups evolve through a risky innovation process, as firms improve and expand their product lines. The model produces an empirically consistent distribution of markups, exhibiting a fat tail and hump shape, formed by the relative rates of markup expansion, entry, and creative destruction. I calibrate the model to match the entire shape of the distribution of U.S. markups from 1970-2010 and quantify the effects of concentration and productivity dispersion on market power. I find that concentration explains only a small fraction of the rise in markups and the decline in the labor share from 1970-1990 to 1990-2010, with the majority driven by increasing gains to innovation.