A key problem in assessing the impact of e-commerce is that the goods that are commonly sold online are not random, so we cannot easily distinguish between price changes driven by e-commerce and price changes that would have happened regardless.
Publications
January 13, 2020
January 13, 2020
The past year has seen a remarkable rise in the quality and quantity of deepfakes — realistic-looking images and videos produced with artificial intelligence that portray someone doing or saying something that never actually happened, such as Nixon delivering an alternate moon landing speech.
January 13, 2020
The eCommerce Directive—a critical building block of the EU’s digital economy—is in need of modernization, but updates should continue to remove obstacles to online commerce and provide legal certainty to businesses and citizens.
January 13, 2020
The United States, the EU, and Japan must band together in stronger trilateral partnership to pressure China into rolling back the mercantilist trade practices it uses to grow advanced, innovation-driven industries.
January 10, 2020
U.S. laws and regulations should recognize and protect AI-generated IP, and assign ownership of AI-generated work to the person or organization that owns the AI.
January 9, 2020
To realize their full potential, small start-up companies must cross the so-called “valley of death”—that precarious stage when their technologies are not yet perfected, investors are still skittish, and customers are scarce. There is a federal program devoted to helping them make this passage: the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
January 8, 2020
Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have released a framework for legislation that sets the bold goal of transitioning to net-zero emissions by 2050, taking a much-needed comprehensive approach to all sources of emissions within the committee’s jurisdiction. It is imperative that Congress now take additional steps to accelerate innovation in new clean energy technologies.
January 6, 2020
The has been a growing disparity across the globe between the governments that are choosing to prioritize innovation and those that aren’t. Recent analysis reflects this, comparing the growth of public R&D funding between 2008 and 2016 across eight major countries.
January 6, 2020
An examination of the scholarly literature shows that China’s mercantilist-powered economic rise and trade expansion have slowed the progress of innovation in the global economy—particularly in North America and Europe.
January 6, 2020
Autonomous vehicles are the future of transportation, but so far, the United States is unprepared for them. Congress needs to act swiftly to establish consistent industry regulations that allow companies to safely test and deploy these vehicles, or it risks delaying their arrival.