UC Berkeley

This dissertation presents three empirical studies of the American intellectual property system.

In the first chapter, my coauthors and I explore the extent to which copyright’s incentive function is aligned with the economic realities of the commercial music industry. Using a novel panel dataset of music sales and streams, we find that that most commercial music—even blockbuster releases—has an extremely short commercial “half-life.”

In the second, I investigate the predictability of patent litigation, the outcome of which is typically thought to be difficult to forecast. Using a computational model of the text of asserted patent claims and other characteristics of the patent and litigation, I find that decisions about patent validity are more predictable than previously recognized.

Finally, I replicate several leading descriptive studies of patent litigation, and find that their substantive conclusions are sensitive to coding choices and the period over which the sample is drawn.