Prof. Daniel Spulber's paper with Pere Arque-Castells, Measuring the Private and Social Returns to R&D: Unintended Spillovers versus Technology Markets, was recently accepted by one of the most prestigious journals in economics, Journal of Political Economy.
Dr. Spulber is an expert in antitrust, platforms and two-sided markets, intellectual property, technology and innovation, and industrial organization.
Abstract:
The canonical approach to measuring private and social returns to R&D assumes diffusion through spillovers. We develop a general framework that allows R&D to diffuse both through spillovers and voluntary technology transfers. To operationalize the framework, we create a dataset of interactions in the market for technology between publicly held U.S. firms. We use changes in tax incentives for R&D to identify causal effects. Taking market channels into account decreases the observed difference between social and private returns to R&D as compared to the canonical approach. The analysis suggests significant gains from trade in markets for technology.
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