Description:

Speakers: Tomer Novikov & Franco Malpassi

Speaker: Franco Malpassi

Title: Unbundled Innovation: Competition and the Rise of the Software Industry

Abstract: The effect of competition on innovation remains ambiguous and of first-order importance to antitrust policy. I study this question in the context of the early US software industry and the unbundling of software from computer hardware due to antitrust action in 1969. In the decade that followed, the packaged software industry went from a $75 million industry to a $2 billion one. Using newly digitized data and exploiting variation in unbundling by software segments, I study whether innovation activity and quality changed in segments that experienced a change in competition. Preliminary descriptive evidence suggests that innovation activity increased as a result of software unbundling.

Speaker: Tomer Novikov

Title: Research proposal: Water Power Saturation and the Adoption of Iron Wheels and Steam in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: This paper explores how local conditions can induce technological leapfrogging. In nineteenth-century Britain, the saturation of water power along rivers forced industrialists to choose between upgrading to iron water wheels or moving directly to steam, depending on local characteristics. By adding data from the Mills Archive Trust, combined with other historical sources, the paper will construct a probabilistic model for estimating the prevalence of non-textile water mills and the partial adoption of the iron water wheel.