The seventeenth volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy provides an accessible forum for bringing the work of leading academic researchers to an audience of policymakers and those interested in the interaction between public policy and innovation. In the first chapter, Joel Waldfogel discusses how reduced costs of production have resulted in a “Golden Age of Television,” arguing that this development has gone underappreciated. The second chapter, by Marc Rysman and Scott Schuh, discusses the prospects for innovation in payment systems, including mobile payments, faster payment systems, and digital currencies. In the third chapter, Catherine Tucker and Amalia Miller analyze the consequences of patient data becoming virtually costless to store, share, and individualize, showing how data management and privacy issues have become a key factor in health policy. The fourth chapter, by Michael Luca, examines how online marketplaces have proliferated over the past decade, evolving far beyond the pioneers such as eBay and Amazon. In the fifth chapter, Tim Bresnahan and Pai-Ling Yin characterize information and communication technologies in the workplace, addressing how wages vary with increasing demand for smart managers and professionals, and workers with organizational participation skills.
 

Shane Greenstein is professor of business administration and cochair of the Harvard business School Digital Initiative and codirector of the Program on the Economics of Digitization at the NBER. Josh Lerner is chair of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit and the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School. He is a research associate and codirector of the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at the NBER. Scott Stern is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and a research associate and director of the Innovation Policy Working Group at the NBER.