Publications

Compulsory Licensing and Innovation. Historical Evidence From German Patents After WWI. (with Petra Moser and Joerg Baten)
Journal of Development Economics, 126: 231-242, 2017
Working paper, Published version
Compulsory licensing allows governments to license patented inventions without the consent of patent owners. Intended to mitigate the potential welfare losses from enforcing foreign-owned patents, many developing countries use this policy to improve access to drugs that are covered by foreign-owned patents. The effects of compulsory licensing on access to new drugs, however, are theoretically ambiguous: Compulsory licensing may encourage innovation by increasing competition or discourage innovation by reducing expected returns to R&D. Empirical evidence is rare, primarily because contemporary settings offer little exogenous variation in compulsory licensing. We address this empirical challenge by exploiting an event of compulsory licensing as a result of World War I when the US Trading with the Enemy Act made all German-owned patents available for licensing to US firms. Firm-level data on German patents indicate that compulsory licensing was associated with a 30 percent increase in invention by German firms whose inventions were licensed.
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, QSB Insight. 

Working Papers

The Indirect Effects of Educational Expansions: Evidence from a Large Enrollment Increase in STEM Majors
Link
Increasing access to education may have consequences that go beyond the effects on marginal students encouraged to enroll. It may change peer effects, school quality, and returns to skill. This paper studies how classmates and teaching inputs affect learning of university students, exploiting an educational expansion in Italian STEM majors. Newly-collected data on 27,236 students indicate that less-prepared classmates and congestion of teaching resources lowered learning of incumbent students in STEM fields. Their learning, however, increased in courses in which the new classmates raised average preparedness. These effects might have had long-lasting consequences on the returns to STEM degrees.
This is a shortened version of my job market paper "The General Equilibrium Effects of Educational Expansion". 
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, Marginal Revolution, IPR News, VoxEu, Washington Post, Science Careers. 
Scientific Education and Innovation: From Technical Diplomas to University STEM Degrees. (with Michela Giorcelli)
Link
This paper uses a change in enrollment requirements in Italian STEM majors to study the effects of university STEM education on innovation and labor market outcomes. University-level scientific education had two direct effects on patenting of students who acquired a STEM degree thanks to the policy. First, it changed the direction of their innovation. Second, it moved these individuals closer to the innovation processes by allowing them to reach top positions within firms' hierarchies. STEM degrees, however, also changed occupational sorting. Some higher-achieving individuals used STEM degrees to enter jobs that required university-level education, but did not focus on patenting.
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, BYU Radio.
Chains of Opportunity Revisited (with Giulia Bovini, Jin Li, Matteo Paradisi, and Michael Powell)
Draft available upon request
This paper studies whether privately owned firms promote their workers using a “slot system,” according to which internal promotions take place only when an existing position becomes available. It exploits a 2011 pension reform in Italy that increased the minimum retirement age differently across workers. The analysis uses variation across firms and over time to isolate the effect of increased retention of older workers on the wage growth and promotions of their younger colleagues. Administrative data on all Italian private-sector workers indicate that individuals working in firms with higher retention of older workers experienced lower wage growth after 2011. A 1 standard deviation increase in retention of older workers decreased wage growth of younger workers by 2 percent. Similarly, a 1 standard deviation increase in retention of older workers decreased the number of promotions to white-collar positions (from blue-collar jobs) and to managerial positions (from blue-collar and white-collar jobs) by 14 percent. These effects are larger (1) among firms with shrinking employment in the years leading to the policy; and (2) among firms in which the older workers affected by the policy were at the top of the wage distribution. Finally, we discuss how competing explanations are not compatible with all these findings.
Reconstruction Aid, Public Infrastructure, and Economic Growth (with Michela Giorcelli)
Link
This paper studies the effects of international reconstruction aid on long-term economic growth. It exploits plausibly exogenous differences between Italian provinces in the amount of grants disbursed through the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of public infrastructure. Provinces that received more reconstruction grants experienced a larger increase in the number of industrial firms and workers. Individuals and firms in these areas also started developing more patents. The same provinces experienced a faster mechanization of the agricultural sector. Motorized machines, such as tractors, replaced workers and significantly boosted agricultural production. Finally, we present evidence that shows how reconstruction grants induced economic growth by allowing Italian provinces to modernize their transportation and communication networks damaged during WWII.

Work in Progress

The Transfer of Innovation (with Michela Giorcelli)
The Effects of Computer-Aided Education on Students' Long-Term Development (with Yi Lu and Hong Song)
Economic Liberalizations and Intergenerational Mobility (with Massimo Anelli and Seth Zimmerman)
The Intergenerational Effects of Educational Expansions. (with Massimo Anelli and Giovanni Peri)