Search Results
Working Paper
International Technology Licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, and Tax Havens
This paper investigates the determinants of international technology licensing using data for 41 countries during 1996-2012. A multi-country model of innovation and international technology licensing yields a dynamic structural gravity equation for royalty payments as a function of fundamentals, including: (i) imperfect intellectual property protection and (ii) tax havens. The gravity equation is estimated using nonlinear methods. The model’s fundamentals account for 56% of the variation in royalty payments. Counterfactual analysis sheds light on the role of intellectual property rights ...
Working Paper
More Trade, Less Diffusion: Technology Transfers and the Dynamic Effects of Import Liberalization
How does international trade affect technology diffusion? We show that tariff increases in Brazil lead to more international technology transfers to Brazilian firms and more citations to foreign patents. The highest increase in citations occurs among firms located near those receiving technology transfers, and it is driven largely by citations to firms transferring technology to Brazil. These findings suggest that import tariffs can facilitate the diffusion of foreign technology by promoting technology transfers. We quantify this effect in a growth model that incorporates trade, technology ...
Working Paper
The Global Diffusion of Ideas
We provide a tractable theory of innovation and technology diffusion to explore the role of international trade in the process of development. We model innovation and diffusion as a process involving the combination of new ideas with insights from other industries or countries. We provide conditions under which each country's equilibrium frontier of knowledge converges to a Frechet distribution, and derive a system of differential equations describing the evolution of the scale parameters of these distributions, i.e., countries' stocks of knowledge. In particular, the growth of a country's ...
Working Paper
Diffusion of Containerization
This paper uses a newly constructed, comprehensive dataset to investigate the diffusion of containerization. The data show that country adoption is exceptionally fast while firm usage increases more slowly. To guide my empirical investigation, I build a multi-country trade model with endogenous adoption of a new transportation technology that is consistent with these facts. I then test empirically the predictions of the model and find that: (1) usage of containerization increases with firms' fixed costs and the size and average income of the container network; and (2) adoption depends on ...
Working Paper
International technology Diffusion: A Gravity Approach
This paper investigates, empirically, the determinants of international technology diffusion. To do that, I set up a multi-country model of innovation and diffusion with perfect enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR). The model yields a gravity equation for bilateral royalty payments that is estimated using methods from empirical trade. I investigate discrepancies between model’s predictions and observed royalty payments to identify the role of fundamentals vs. other factors such as imperfect IPR protection. Fundamentals account for most of the variation in royalty payments, ...
Working Paper
International Technology Licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, and Tax Havens
This paper investigates the determinants of international technology licensing using data for 50 countries during 1996-2012. A multi-country model of innovation and international technology licensing yields a dynamic structural gravity equation for royalty payments as a function of fundamentals, including imperfect intellectual property protection and differences in corporate taxation. The gravity equation is estimated with nonlinear methods. The model's fundamentals account for about 60% of the variation in royalty payments. A quantitative analysis sheds light on the impact of global ...
Working Paper
International Technology Licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, and Tax Havens
This paper investigates the determinants of international technology licensing using data for 61 countries during 1995-2012. A multi-country model of innovation and diffusion with international technology licensing yields a structural gravity equation for royalty payments as a function of fundamentals. The gravity equation is estimated using nonlinear methods. The model’s fundamentals account for 45% of the variation in royalty payments. Other factors such as imperfect IPR protection and tax havens account for a substantial fraction of the unexplained variation. A back-of-the-envelope ...
Report
Germs, Social Networks, and Growth
Does the pattern of social connections between individuals matter for macroeconomic outcomes? If so, where do these differences come from and how large are their effects? Using network analysis tools, we explore how different social network structures affect technology diffusion and thereby a country's rate of growth. The correlation between high-diffusion networks and income is strongly positive. But when we use a model to isolate the effect of a change in social networks, the effect can be positive, negative, or zero. The reason is that networks diffuse ideas and disease. Low-diffusion ...
Working Paper
International Technology Licensing, Intellectual Property Rights, and Tax Havens
This paper investigates the determinants of international technology licensing using data for 50 countries during 1996-2012. A multi-country model of innovation and international technology licensing yields a dynamic structural gravity equation for royalty payments as a function of fundamentals, including imperfect intellectual property protection and differences in corporate taxation. The gravity equation is estimated with nonlinear methods. The model's fundamentals account for about 60% of the variation in royalty payments. A quantitative analysis sheds light on the impact of global ...
Working Paper
Disclosure Regulation, Intangible Capital and the Disappearance of Public Firms
Since the mid-1990s, the number of listed firms in the U.S. has halved, and their public disclosure has become opaquer. To explain these trends, we develop a general equilibrium model where the choices of going public or private and the transparency of voluntary disclosure are characterized analytically. In the equilibrium, the stock market with directed search and the private equity market with random search co-exist. According to the estimation, stricter disclosure regulation and increased intangible capital share are the key drivers of the observed patterns. Lastly, we characterize a ...