Working Papers

Trademarks and Gains from Variety: The Role of Multinational Enterprises

Winner of the 2024 Best Job Market Paper Award (European Economic Association and UniCredit Foundation).
Finalist for the Bank of Canada Best Student Paper Award.

Abstract | Paper

Novel differentiated products, or varieties, are a key source of welfare gains from globalization. Yet standard measures based on trade data cannot separate production from the design origin of goods. However, imports are not always "foreign" varieties as we might imagine them, since firm boundaries often span national borders. I address this limitation using U.S. trademark registrations, which provide a consumer-oriented measure of varieties tied to design rather than production. Two findings emerge. First, variety gains from trade between 1995 and 2014 are two to three times larger when measured with trademarks than with sectoral trade flows. Second, by combining trademark data with Chinese customs records, I re-evaluate the effect of imports on product entry. Imports from Chinese-owned firms reduce the introduction of new U.S. and foreign products, while imports from multinationals located in China increase it. These results show that multinational activity biases standard estimates of variety gains and reshape our understanding of how import competition affects innovation.

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.