Abstract: Policies that mandate disclosure of innovative project outcomes aim to increase innovation by limiting wasteful duplicative R&D efforts. Yet, such policies change not only the ex-post information environment but also firms’ ex-ante innovation incentives. Firms may slow down their own innovation efforts in anticipation of increased disclosure by others. We examine the innovation-related impacts of the 2017 FDA Final Rule amendment, which mandates disclosure of clinical trial results for pharmaceutical firms. We show that the policy hastened and increased disclosure of results for clinical trials post-completion but also increased the time to completion of clinical trials, the time between early phases of clinical trials, and delays in development-related investments. We provide evidence consistent with mandated disclosure leading firms to wait to learn from their competitors. Our results suggest that mandating disclosure may slow innovation when there is value to waiting.

Abstract: Many of America’s older industrial cities face widespread housing vacancy and abandonment, despite sustained public demolition programs in these cities. Evaluating demolition programs is challenging, since abandoned homes can be both a cause and a consequence of low neighborhood quality. Moreover, although demolition programs are implemented locally, the sorting of residents into neighborhoods means that local policy efforts can have equilibrium ramifications citywide. In this paper, we develop an equilibrium model of residential sorting with endogenous home abandonment and estimate the model using data from Baltimore City. We leverage a novel source of variation in demolition costs from randomness in the within-block spatial arrangement of abandoned homes to overcome the identification challenges. Our estimates quantify the disutility abandoned homes bring to local neighborhoods. Using the estimated model, we evaluate alternative demolition policies and quantify their effects on different demographic groups.