International Data on Measuring Management Practices

By Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2016

We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of "open ended questions" (like the World Management Survey) with "closed questions" (like the MOPS). For this type of data,...

Making Private Data Accessible in an Opaque Industry: The Experience of the Private Capital Research Institute

By Leslie Jeng and Josh Lerner

American Economic Review, May 2016

Private markets are becoming an increasingly important way of financing rapidly growing and mature firms, and private investors are reputed to have far-reaching economic impacts. These important markets, however, are uniquely difficult to study. This pape...

Modernizing Federal Economic Statistics

By William G. Bostic Jr., Ron S. Jarmin, and Brian Moyer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Official statistical data on the structure, evolution and performance of the U.S. economy are produced by a variety federal, state and local agencies. Much of the methodology, policy frameworks and infrastructure for U.S. economic measurement have been in...

Battling over Jobs: Occupational Licensing in Health Care

By Morris M. Kleiner

American Economic Review, May 2016

The goal of this paper is to outline the major tensions between the monopoly face of licensing versus potential consumer protection goals of occupational regulation in the health care industry. Historically, health care occupations limited supply as a met...

Should the US Eliminate Entry Barriers to the Practice of Law? Perspectives Shaped by Industry Deregulation

By Clifford Winston and Quentin Karpilow

American Economic Review, May 2016

States' requirements that lawyers obtain a license to practice law, as well as American Bar Association (ABA) regulations of legal practice, constitute barriers to entry to the legal profession. In this paper, we argue that eliminating entry barriers in l...

Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber

By Judd Cramer and Alan B. Krueger

American Economic Review, May 2016

In most cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated and has restricted entry. Ride sharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, which use mobile internet technology to connect passengers and drivers, have begun to compete with traditional taxis. This paper ...

Patents and Research Investments: Assessing the Empirical Evidence

By Eric Budish, Benjamin N. Roin, and Heidi Williams

American Economic Review, May 2016

A well-developed theoretical literature--dating back at least to Nordhaus (1969)--has analyzed optimal patent policy design. We re-present the core trade-off of the Nordhaus model and highlight an empirical question which emerges from the Nordhaus framewo...

Patent Licensing, Technology Transfer, and Innovation

By Mark A. Lemley and Robin Feldman

American Economic Review, May 2016

Traditional justifications for patents are based on direct or indirect contribution to product creation. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) might provide such innovation, either directly, through working the patent or transfer of technology to others who do, ...

Patent Quality and Examination in Europe

By Dietmar Harhoff

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper reports on effects of recent administrative reforms at the European Patent Office (EPO). In EPO-granted patents, claims numbers started to decline in 2008 when new claims fees became effective, claims sections in patents became shorter, and ind...

Patent Remedies

By Carl Shapiro

American Economic Review, May 2016

Since the Supreme Court's eBay decision in 2006, the U.S. has employed a hybrid patent remedy system that mixes property and liability rules. When the patent owner and the infringer are competitors, the courts typically issue a permanent injunction requir...

Declining Business Dynamism: What We Know and the Way Forward

By Ryan A. Decker, John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review, May 2016

A growing body of evidence indicates that the U.S. economy has become less dynamic in recent years. This trend is evident in declining rates of gross job and worker flows as well as declining rates of entrepreneurship and young firm activity, and the tren...

Wage Posting and Business Cycles

By Giuseppe Moscarini and Fabien Postel-Vinay

American Economic Review, May 2016

The canonical model of job search and wage posting (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) establishes a natural connection between the average wage growth in the economy and the pace of Employer-to-Employer (EE) transitions, predicting wage growth to be positively...

Firm Entry and Macroeconomic Dynamics: A State-Level Analysis

By François Gourio, Todd Messer, and Michael Siemer

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using an annual panel of US states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real GDP,...

The Role of Startups in Structural Transformation

By Robert C. Dent, Fatih Karahan, Benjamin Pugsley, and Ayşegül Şahin

American Economic Review, May 2016

The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation--the secular reallocation of employment across sectors--over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm...

Popular Attitudes toward Markets and Democracy: Russia and United States Compared 25 Years Later

By Maxim Boycko and Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, May 2016

We repeat a survey we did in the waning days of the Soviet Union (Shiller, Boycko and Korobov, AER 1991) comparing attitudes towards free markets between Moscow and New York. Additional survey questions, from Gibson Duch and Tedin (J. Politics 1992) are a...

War, Inflation, and Social Capital

By Sergei Guriev and Nikita Melnikov

American Economic Review, May 2016

We use weekly data from 79 Russian regions to measure the impact of economic shocks and proximity to war in Ukraine on social capital in Russian regions. We proxy social capital by the relative intensity of internet searches for the most salient dimension...

Russia's Billionaires

By Daniel Treisman

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using data collected by Forbes since the 1990s, I examine the emergence and survival of the super-wealthy in Russia over the past two decades and compare Russia's record to those of other countries. The major surge in the number of Russian billionaires ca...

Paid Parental Leave Laws in the United States: Does Short-Duration Leave Affect Women's Labor-Force Attachment?

By Tanya S. Byker

American Economic Review, May 2016

I analyze the effects of short-duration paid parental leave on maternal labor supply. Using monthly longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, my event-study research design estimates impacts of paid leave laws in California an...

Has the Increased Attachment of Women to the Labor Market Changed a Family's Ability to Smooth Income Shocks?

By Olga Gorbachev

American Economic Review, May 2016

An increase in a married woman's attachment to the labor market affected her family's ability to smooth unexpected income shocks. Between 1970 and 1990, the sharp rise in labor market attachment provided an increasingly important channel for smoothing sho...

Evolution of the Marriage Earnings Gap for Women

By Chinhui Juhn and Kristin McCue

American Economic Review, May 2016

Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panels linked to Social Security earnings records, we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975. We compare ordinary least squares and fixed-ef...