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)
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of the European Economic Association
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
Promotions are an important component of a worker’s wage. Yet, traditional theories about the factors driving career progressions typically focus on worker-level characteristics like human capital acquisition, on learning, or on broad market-level factors like labor supply and demand. We study coworker-career spillovers that arise in firms with limited promotion opportunities. We exploit a 2011 Italian pension reform that tightened eligibility criteria for the public pension. We use administrative data on Italian private-sector and leverage cross-firm variation to isolate the effect of retirement delays among soon-to-retire workers on the promotions of their colleagues. We find evidence of career spillovers, and the patterns of these spillovers are consistent with the idea that older workers block the careers of their younger colleagues in firms with limited opportunities. Delays in retirement lead to a decrease in younger workers’ wage growth. Promotions from blue to white-collar positions fall in response to retirement delays among white-collar workers, whereas there is no effect of such delays among blue-collars. The effects are largest in firms with shrinking employment in the years leading up to the policy and negligible among fast-growing firms. We derive in a model the key features necessary to explain our results.
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.
The Effects of Computer-Assisted Learning on Students' Long-Term Development (with Yi Lu and Hong Song)
Draft available upon request
This paper examines the effect of computer-assisted education on students’ long-term development, exploring the implementation of a Chinese policy that connected the country’s best teachers to rural students through broadband internet. We find evidence that exposure to higher-quality education through computer assistance improved students’ academic achievement, labor market performance, computer and internet usage, and non-cognitive outcomes. We observe these effects between 7 and 10 years after program implementation. These findings indicate that education technology might have long-lasting positive effects on a wide variety of outcomes. Moreover, technology can be effective in reducing the rural-urban education gap.

Work in Progress

The Transfer of Innovation (with Michela Giorcelli)
Economic Liberalizations and Intergenerational Mobility (with Massimo Anelli and Seth Zimmerman)