Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting by US inventors increased by 31 percent in émigré fields. Regressions which instrument for émigré fields with pre-1933 fields of dismissed German chemists confirm a substantial increase in US invention. Inventor-level data indicate that émigrés encouraged innovation by attracting new researchers to their fields, rather than by increasing the productivity of incumbent inventors. (JEL J15, L65, N62, O31, O34)
Divorce laws establish spouses' individual property rights over household resources and determine when divorce is allowed. This paper examines how such laws influence the intertemporal behavior and the welfare of U.S. married couples. I build a model of household choice about consumption, labor supply and divorce under multiple divorce law regimes and I estimate it using exogenous variation in U.S. divorce laws from the 1970s to the 1990s. Couples responded to equal division of property and unilateral divorce by increasing tangible assets up to 19%, which suggests the presence of a strong income effect for the primary earner, and by reducing female employment by over 5 percentage points, because the threat of divorce granted additional bargaining power to married woman. The bargaining weight of women implied by these responses in the model corresponds to a third of the weight of men. This indicates that equal division of assets benefited women when it was first introduced, as they has such low weight in marriage decision. However, counterfactual experiments show that equal division may be potentially detrimental to women as they gain equality in their marriage. When men and women have the same bargaining weight, women are better off in a separate property regime, as they may need more assets than their husband to smooth consumption when going into a divorce.
and Sciences-Po for helpful comments. Yin Wei Soon provided outstanding research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign-owned inventions without the consent of foreign patent owners. This paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensing after World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act to examine the effects of compulsory licensing on domestic invention. Difference-in-differences analyses of nearly 130,000 chemical inventions suggest that compulsory licensing increased domestic invention by 20 percent. (JEL D45, L24, N42, O31, O34)
Udry, Glen Weyl and participants at various seminars and conferences for helpful comments. Eva Ng, Parina Lalchandani, and Poulod Borojerdi provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
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