Open source is key to innovation, but we know little about how to incentivize it. In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in May 2019 and enabled...

We use the U.S. patent data merged with firm-level datasets to establish new facts about the role of mega firms in generating "novel patents"--innovations that introduce new combinations of technology components for the first time. While the importance of mega firms in novel patents had been...

More than 1,500 organizations and investors representing over $40 trillion in assets have committed to fossil fuel divestment to combat climate change. Will it work? This chapter explores whether divestment might induce green innovation, a critical component of transitioning to a cleaner...

Do large firms produce more valuable inventions, and if so, why? After confirming that large firms indeed produce more valuable inventions, we consider two possible sources: a superior ability to invent, or a superior ability to extract value from their inventions. We develop a simple model that...