Research

Do patents facilitate or frustrate innovation? Lawyers, economists, and politicians who have staked out strong positions in this debate often attempt to validate their claims by invoking the historical record—but they typically get the history wrong. The purpose of this book is to get the history right by showing that patent systems are the product of contending interests at different points in production chains battling over economic surplus. The larger the potential surplus, the more extreme are the efforts of contending parties, now and in the past, to search out, generate, and exploit any and all sources of friction. Patent systems, as human creations, are therefore necessarily ridden with imperfections; nirvana is not on the menu. The most interesting intellectual issue is not how patent systems are imperfect, but why historically US-style patent systems have come to dominate all other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The answer offered by the essays in this volume is that they create a temporary property right that can be traded in a market, thereby facilitating a productive division of labor and making it possible for firms to transfer technological knowledge to one another by overcoming the free-rider problem. Precisely because the value of a patent does not inhere in the award itself but rather in the market value of the resulting property right, patent systems foster a decentralized ecology of inventors and firms that ceaselessly extends the frontiers of what is economically possible.

We propose a methodology for defining urban markets based on builtup landcover classified from daytime satellite imagery. Compared to markets defined using minimum thresholds for nighttime light intensity, daytime imagery identify an order of magnitude more markets, capture more of India’s urban population, are more realistically jagged in shape, and reveal more variation in the spatial distribution of economic activity. We conclude that daytime satellite data are a promising source for the study of urban forms.

We review the literature that studies the dynamics of firms in foreign markets, at both the intensive and extensive margins, and their aggregate implications. We first summarize a set of micro facts on exporter entry, expansion, contraction, and exit and several macro facts about the response of aggregate trade flows to trade-policy and business-cycle shocks. We then present the canonical model developed to account for these facts and discuss its connection to the empirical evidence. We show how three model features—future uncertain profits, an investment in market access, and high depreciation of that access upon exit—generate transition dynamics and long-run aggregate outcomes from a cut in tariffs. The model and its extensions contribute to our understanding of trade integration and the evolution of future trade barriers. We discuss the key challenges faced by the canonical model, its possible extensions, and applications of the framework to recent global events.

The last decades have seen a significant increase in the concentration of economic activity. Firms are getting bigger and the top firms account for a larger and larger share of employment and sales. The paper The ‘Matthew effect’ and market concentration: Search complementarities and monopsony Power provides a novel and intriguing take on these patterns. It starts from the premise that production is subject to search frictions. Producing firms need to find retailers to sell their goods to consumers. Similarly, retailers need to find producers to actually have something to sell. Crucially, both producers and retailers can decide on their search effort and search more intensely if the return of doing so is large.

Occasional widely publicized controversies have led to the perception that growth statistics from developing countries are not to be trusted. Based on the comparison of several data sources and analysis of novel IMF audit data, we find no support for the view that growth is on average measured less accurately or manipulated more in developing than in developed countries. While developing countries face many challenges in measuring growth, so do higher-income countries, especially those with complex and sometimes rapidly changing economic structures. However, we find consistently higher dispersion of growth estimates from developing countries, lending support to the view that classical measurement error is more problematic in poorer countries and that a few outliers may have had a disproportionate effect on (mis)measurement perceptions. We identify several measurement challenges that are specific to poorer countries, namely limited statistical capacity, the use of outdated data and methods, the large share of the agricultural sector, the informal economy, and limited price data. We show that growth measurement based on the System of National Accounts (SNA) can be improved if supplemented with information from other data sources (for example, satellite-based data on vegetation yields) that address some of the limitations of SNA.

Can targeting information to network-central farmers induce more adoption of a new agricultural technology? By combining social network data and a field experiment in 200 villages in Malawi, we find that targeting central farmers is important to spur the diffusion process. We also provide evidence of one explanation for why centrality matters: a diffusion process governed by complex contagion. Our results are consistent with a model in which many farmers need to learn from multiple people before they adopt themselves. This means that without proper targeting of information, the diffusion process can stall and technology adoption remains perpetually low.

While intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship is a well-known regularity, we hypothesize that in a transition economy where the state retains an important role, those whose parents are government workers may also be more likely to become business owners. We test the hypothesis in China and show that (1) on average, both entrepreneurs and government workers have a higher likelihood of having children who own incorporated businesses and (2) In provinces where government involvement is higher, the likelihood that children of government workers (entrepreneurs) own incorporated businesses is significantly higher (lower). Our study demonstrates that the local economic business environment shapes the influence of parental background on business ownership.

This paper employs a benchmark heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic model to examine a number of plausible drivers of the rise in wealth inequality in the US over the last forty years. We find that the significant drop in tax progressivity starting in the late 1970s is the most important driver of the increase in wealth inequality since then. The sharp observed increases in earnings inequality and the falling labor share over the recent decades fall far short of accounting for the data. The model can also account for the dynamics of wealth inequality over the period—in particular the observed U-shape—and here the observed variations in asset returns are key. Returns on assets matter because portfolios of households differ systematically both across and within wealth groups, a feature in our model that also helps us to match, quantitatively, a key long-run feature of wealth and earnings distributions: the former is much more highly concentrated than the latter.

The most common business enterprise form in Germany today is the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH). The GmbH offers entrepreneurs the partnership’s flexibility combined with limited liability, capital lock-in, and other traits associated with corporations. Earlier enterprise forms such as the partnership and corporation were codified versions of longstanding practice; the GmbH, on the other hand, was the lawgiver’s creation. Authorized in 1892, the GmbH appeared during a period of ferment in German enterprise law and was an early example of the “Private Limited-Liability Company” (PLLC) prevalent in many economies today. This paper traces the debates and the legislative process that led to the GmbH’s introduction. The new form reflected challenges created by the corporation reform of 1884, problems in German colonial companies, and the view that British company law had put German firms at a competitive disadvantage. Many new enterprises adopted the GmbH, but significant sections of the financial and legal community harbored strong reservations about this legal innovation.

Delegating managerial tasks is essential for firm growth. Most firms in developing countries, however, do not hire outside managers but instead rely on family members. In this paper, we ask if this lack of managerial delegation can explain why firms in poor countries are small and whether it has important aggregate consequences. We construct a model of firm growth where entrepreneurs have a fixed time endowment to run their daily operations. As firms grow large, the need to hire outside managers increases. Firms' willingness to expand therefore depends on the ease with which delegation can take place. We calibrate the model to plant-level data from the United States and India. We identify the key parameters of our theory by targeting the experimental evidence on the effect of managerial practices on firm performance from Bloom et al. (2013). We find that inefficiencies in the delegation environment account for 11 percent of the income per capita difference between the United States and India. They also contribute to the small size of Indian producers, but would cause substantially more harm for US firms. The reason is that US firms are larger on average and managerial delegation is especially valuable for large firms, thus making delegation efficiency and other factors affecting firm growth complements.

This chapter examines basic features of services trade and asks how well current modeling strategies capture the features. It then proposes and quantifies extensions to a basic structural gravity model that incorporate these features. The extended model allows people to handle goods trade and services trade in an encompassing framework. The chapter presents some basic facts about services trade and some quantitative implications of the model. Tangible goods are sold in country n at a markup over the cost of the inputs used to produce them. A result of the competition is that the low-cost producer of a variety serves the market and its price equals either the cost of the second lowest-cost potential supplier of that variety to market n or the monopoly price, whichever is lower. Ultimately, the value of intangible services will flow in the form of royalties to the country whose intangible sector generated the intangible assets.

African agricultural markets are characterized by low farmer revenues and high consumer food prices. Many have worried that this wedge is partially driven by imperfect competition among intermediaries. This paper provides experimental evidence from Kenya on intermediary market structure. Randomized cost shocks and demand subsidies are used to identify a structural model of market competition. Estimates reveal that traders act consistently with joint profit maximization and earn median markups of 39 percent. Exogenously induced firm entry has negligible effects on prices, and low take-up of subsidized entry offers implies large fixed costs. We estimate that traders capture 82 percent of total surplus.

This paper seeks to explain why billions of people in developing countries either have no access to electricity or lack a reliable supply. We present evidence that these shortfalls are a consequence of electricity being treated as a right and that this sets off a vicious four-step circle. In step 1, because a social norm has developed that all deserve power independent of payment, subsidies, theft, and nonpayment are widely tolerated. In step 2, electricity distribution companies lose money with each unit of electricity sold and in total lose large sums of money. In step 3, government-owned distribution companies ration supply to limit losses by restricting access and hours of supply. In step 4, power supply is no longer governed by market forces and the link between payment and supply is severed, thus reducing customers' incentives to pay. The equilibrium outcome is uneven and sporadic access that undermines growth.

This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank's newly constructed Women, Business and the Law database, we document large and persistent gender inequalities, especially with regard to pay and treatment of parenthood. We find positive correlations between more equal laws pertaining to women in the workforce and more equal labor market outcomes, such as higher female labor force participation and a smaller wage gap between men and women.

Using employer-employee matched and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of productivity to firm reorganizations as measured by changes in the number of management layers. We show that, as a result of an exogenous demand or productivity shock that makes the firm reorganize and add a management layer, quantity-based productivity increases by about 6%, while revenue-based productivity drops by around 3%. Such a reorganization makes the firm more productive but also increases the quantity produced to an extent that lowers the price charged by the firm and, as a result, its revenue-based productivity as well.