Early View

Lorenz Brachtendorf, Fabian Gaessler, and Dietmar Harhoff
This paper introduces a semantics-based method for approximating the standard essentiality of patents. We provide details on the procedure that generates the measure of standard essentiality and present the results of several validation and robustness exercises.

Hiroshi Kitamura, Noriaki Matsushima, and Misato Sato
We explore the supply chain problem of a downstream durable goods monopolist, who chooses one of the following trading modes: an exclusive supply chain with an incumbent supplier or an open supply chain, allowing the monopolist to trade with a new efficient entrant in the future.

Jonathan R. Peterson
This study explores how bonding contracts improve employee attraction and retention. The model offers several empirical findings regarding a variety of common bonding practices.

Lin Hu and Mandar Oak
This paper studies the effects of asymmetric punishment of bribery on both bribery and compliance with regulations. We show that, under symmetric punishment, inducing whistle-blowing has no effect on the frequency of bribery.

Jie Shuai, Mengyuan Xia, and Chenhang Zeng
Existing studies on partial ownership usually overlook the effects of vertically related markets. Our paper highlights the importance of the upstream market on downstream firms' incentives to acquire partial ownership and the consequent welfare implications.

Amanda E. Kowalski
A fundamental concern for researchers who analyze and design experiments is that the estimate obtained from the experiment might not be externally valid for other policies of interest. Researchers often attempt to assess external validity by comparing data from an experiment to external data. In this paper, I discuss approaches from the treatment effects literature that researchers can use to begin the examination of external validity internally, within the data from a single experiment.

Dean Karlan, Adam Osman, and Jonathan Zinman
Two for-profit Philippine banks, aiming to increasing microlending to the poor, incorporated a widely used poverty measurement tool into their loan applications and tested the tool using randomized training content. The strategy backfired, leading to no additional poor applicants and potentially lower-performing loans. This cautionary tale is an example of why management may want include social outcomes directly into employee performance evaluations, or silo corporate social responsibility efforts from core operations.

Robert W. Fairlie
Governments and donors around the world spend billions of dollars subsidizing entrepreneurship training programs. Unbiased evaluation estimates are paramount to understanding whether subsidies and investments in these programs are justified. The goal of this paper is to compare nonexperimental to experimental methods for evaluating the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training programs that provide training in management, marketing, accounting, legal, and other aspects of starting and running businesses.

Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer
Digitization has transformed how users find and use copyrighted goods, but many existing legal options remain difficult to access, possibly leading to infringement. In a field experiment, we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Our results suggest that ex-post monetization (e.g., licensing after use) may expand the market, and that rights holders can create value by minimizing search and transactions costs.