Job Market Paper

Trademarks and Gains from Variety: The Role of Multinational Enterprises

Finalist for The Bank of Canada Best Student Paper Award.
Selected for presentations at: ASSA 2025 Annual Meeting; Women in Central Banking Workshop; Yale EGC/IGC Firms, Trade, and Development Conference; Simon Fraser University lunch seminar; CEP/LSE-Warwick Junior Trade Workshop; Workshop on International Economic Networks; WEAI 99th Annual Conference; CESifo Venice Summer Institute; 58th Canadian Economic Association; Midwest International Trade Spring Meeting; Wharton Innovation Doctoral Symposium; GSIPE Workshop; JIE Summer School (poster).

Abstract | Paper (version: October 2024)

The availability of novel differentiated products, or varieties, constitutes a significant portion of the welfare gains from globalization, yet attempts to empirically quantify these gains suffer from a number of shortcomings. This paper uses data on trademarks registered in the United States to overcome one major shortcoming: the inability to disentangle production from design origin of new goods using trade data. First, I quantify the variety gains from trade, obtaining 2-3 times larger variety gains for the years 1995-2014 compared to using standard measures. Second, I disentangle two channels through which import competition from China affects the introduction of new US varieties. Combining trademarks with detailed Chinese customs data, I show that only imports from Chinese-owned firms located in China have a detrimental effect on the introduction of new American products in the US market. Instead, imports from multinational enterprises located in China increase the availability of American products for US buyers. This paper suggests that existing estimates of welfare gains from new varieties might be biased in the presence of multinational enterprises and provides a new perspective on the effects of import competition on product innovation.

Working Papers

Industrial Policy in the Global Semiconductor Sector (with Pinelopi Goldberg, Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, and Jeff Thurk)

Coverage: NBER Digest.

Abstract | Paper | NBER WP

The resurgence of subsidies and industrial policies has raised concerns about their potential inefficiency and alignment with multilateral principles. Critics warn that such policies may divert resources to less efficient firms and provoke retaliatory measures from other countries, leading to a wasteful "subsidy race." However, subsidies for sectors with inherent cross-border externalities can have positive global effects. This paper examines these issues within the semiconductor industry: a key driver of economic growth and innovation with potentially significant learning-by-doing and strategic importance due to its dual-use applications. Our study aims to: (1) document and quantify recent industrial policies in the global semiconductor sector, (2) explore the rationale behind these policies, and (3) evaluate their economic impacts, particularly their cross-border effects, and compatibility with multilateral principles. We employ historical analysis, natural language processing, and a model-based approach to measure government support and its impacts. Our findings indicate that government support has been vital for the industry’s growth, with subsidies being the primary form of support. They also highlight the importance of cross-border technology transfers through FDI, business and research collaborations, and technology licensing. China, despite significant subsidies, does not stand out as an outlier compared to other countries, given its market size. Preliminary model estimates indicate that while learning-by-doing exists, it is smaller than commonly believed, with significant international spillovers. These spillovers likely reflect cross-country technology transfers and the role of fabless clients in disseminating knowledge globally through their interactions with foundries. Such cross-border spillovers are not merely accidental but result from deliberate actions by market participants that cannot be taken for granted. Firms may choose to share knowledge across borders or restrict access to frontier technology, thereby excluding certain countries. Future research will use model estimates to simulate the quantitative implications of subsidies and to explore the dynamics of a "subsidy race" in the semiconductor industry.

Assortative Matching in Patent Production

Abstract | Paper

This paper studies the collaboration process of inventors using the universe of patents filed at the European Patent Office between 1978 and 2017. I develop a one-factor static Roy model predicting that inventors sort into leaders and supporters based on an endogenous cut-off rule, and then match together to produce patents in teams of different size. Consistent with the model predictions, empirically I find that more productive leaders and supporters sort into bigger teams. Most importantly, leaders' productivity exhibits a strong positive correlation with the productivity of supporters working with them, but this correlation decreases in magnitude as team size increases. The extent of the assortative matching is significant: in the most conservative case, a one standard deviation increase in leaders' productivity is associated with doubling the average supporter productivity. The paper concludes with empirical evidence on the life-cycle of inventors, who move to bigger teams as they age and become leaders after gaining experience and learning from working on previous patents.

Works in progress

Human Capital Spillovers Across Cities (with Pablo Valenzuela-Casasempere)

Abstract | Slides

This paper studies human capital spillovers among Spanish workers. Leveraging administrative matched employer-employee data for Spain between 2006 and 2020, we study whether the experience gained by workers in larger cities transfers to workers in smaller cities when they relocate. We find that, for workers in medium-sized cities, their three-year wage growth is 1.2 log points larger for each year of experience their coworkers accumulated in a large city. This positive knowledge spillover may mitigate the negative welfare effects of restricting the growth of large cities – an avenue we plan to explore in future research.

The Composition of Intangible Capital Adoption

Abstract

This paper studies cross-border royalty payments from and to the United States for three categories of intellectual property: trademarks, computer software, and outcomes of Research & Development. I document significant heterogeneity in the foreign adoption of these intellectual property types, driven by differences in geographic distance from the United States, strength of intellectual property protection, and a country’s GDP per capita. These findings shed light on the role of technological adoption in explaining cross-country differences in economic growth.