Ideas are hard to protect. Court patent enforcement is uncertain and can be shaped by asymmetries in firms' intellectual property protection (IPP) investments, such as their patent portfolios or IP legal teams. I develop and empirically assess a framework where these IPP investments shape entry barriers by simultaneously inhibiting rival business stealing, and facilitating profitable entry into rival product markets. As a result, large, innovative, `superstar' firms endogenously arise from greater IPP investment incentives tied to their existing market power and IPP investment cost advantages. However, the aggregate impact of these superstars for economic growth and consumer welfare may be negative due to excessive stifling and copying of new entrants’ innovations. Using a novel firm-matched patent portfolio and IP litigation event dataset, I find evidence supporting this mechanism and that existing patent enforcement may inhibit creative destruction and harm consumer welfare.

Cash utilization in US merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions has increased over 50% since the early 1990s amidst a secular, global M&A boom. How does this cash-use relate to firm's cash stockpiles, and what are the aggregate implications for firm innovative efforts, growth and monetary policy? To answer these questions, we pose a general equilibrium theory of R&D-intensive firm cash stockpiling and use in M&A transactions. M&A cash bids can close faster than those externally financed, hence reducing the hazard of competing offers and external risks of trade breakdown. A higher common-value component in M&A arising from transferable productivity of firms' intangible assets spurs increased M&A competition and serial acquirer cash-stockpiles. Despite sellers receiving a cash-premium as compensation, cash-use  biases M&A rents and growth incentives towards serial acquirers. Higher nominal interest rates  differentially impact internal and external growth incentives across firms, re-shaping the firm-size and productivity distribution.	

A widely-used heuristic in real estate is that households are better off searching for a home in housing markets with low price-to-rent ratios. Through the lens of a model of search for differentiated homes and time-varying rents, we assess the implications of this heuristic for the expected surplus of US home buyers. We propose model-implied restrictions, based on rents, transactions prices and days on the market, to estimate our model. Within cities, lower price-to-rent is significantly associated with higher expected buyer surplus only for large dense urban cities. Across similarly dense cities, variation in price-to-rent ratios are unrelated to expected buyer surplus as it reflects better average match quality rather than bargaining power between buyers and sellers.  

Dislocations in money markets across several major jurisdictions have raised questions about the effectiveness of monetary policy implementation mechanisms. We develop a heterogeneous agent, search-based model of interbank markets and monetary policy implementation which explains the changes in the functioning of money markets. Banks meet payment shocks by trading re-serves in a centralized (collateralized) morning market, over-the-counter (un-collateralized) afternoon markets or with the central bank at the end of day. To preclude a holdup problem, banks without access to central bank facilities carry intraday precautionary reserves which can lead to market segmentation if these buffers exceed the end-of-day reserve demands. The model provides testable implications to evaluate the changes to implementation mechanismsin jurisdictions like the US, EU and Canada.

We develop, test and structurally estimate a general equilibrium theory of firms’ R&D policies over their life cycle in the presence of public and private knowledge spillovers. We test the theory using data on patent license agreements and patent citations. Early-stage firms innovative efforts have negative associations to publicly shared knowledge, while mature firms have positive ties to their IP being utilized by others. In contrast, privatized knowledge sharing through license agreements has positive ties to early-stage firms’ R&D but negative for mature firms.