Job Market Paper
Cathedrals Opening Bazaars: Placing Open-Source Software in the Patent Technology Space
Xiaofeng Gong
[PDF] (draft available)
Large profit-seeking firms publish code they could keep secret or patent: cathedrals open the bazaar. Without rivals, or users who build on what is released, opening would earn a firm nothing, so the literature gives it reasons: shaping what users adopt, rivals, and the community. These reasons predict different technologies, yet existing studies measure how much firms open, not what, because code carries no technology class. This paper builds the measurement. A language model places corporate GitHub repositories in the patent classification's main groups, and the Bar–Leiponen distance compares what each of 751 large firms opens with what it patents. The portfolios are further apart than a chance reference that shuffles technology labels among each firm's own patents and repositories, yet fixed portfolios reproduce that excess: separation is not evidence of choice, and only deviations from technology peers can carry it. The patent and open-source mix shows no response to 2019's eligibility guidance distinguishable from zero.
Papers under Review
Why Do Sanctions Persist? Scarcity Rents and Endogenous Domestic Political Power
Xiaofeng Gong, Yuechuan Zhao, and Chunping Zhong
Under review, Comparative Economic Studies
Do Subsidies Work When Technology Access Is Restricted? A Schumpeterian Model of Strategic-Sector Industrial Policy
Xiaofeng Gong and Chunping Zhong
Under review, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
Measuring Racial Disparities in Police Stops: Evidence from Telemetric Mobility Data
Xiaofeng Gong, Yuling Han, Susan Parker, Matthew B. Ross, and Stephen L. Ross
Under review, Quarterly Journal of Economics
The Ethnic Composition of Inventors in Entrepreneurial Firms
Talia Bar, Delia Furtado, and Xiaofeng Gong
Invited chapter, under review, Handbook of Research on Immigration and Entrepreneurship
Work in Progress
Price-Mediated Suppression in Proprietary–Open-Source Competition
Xiaofeng Gong
Work in progress
Strategic Ignorance in Media Markets: Unauthorized Distribution and Foreign Entry
Xiaofeng Gong
Work in progress
Publications
Economic and Financial Sanctions: Academic Progress and Disputes
Chunping Zhong and Xiaofeng Gong
Russian East European and Central Asian Studies, 2023, no. 1
(in Chinese)
Why Is It Difficult for Sanctions to Achieve Their Intended Goals? Evidence from the Global Sanctions Database
Chunping Zhong, Yuechuan Zhao, and Xiaofeng Gong
Eurasian Economy, 2026, no. 3: 50–73
(in Chinese)