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.
 

The eighteenth annual volume of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy focuses on research that explores the interplay between new technologies and organizational structures, such as networks and corporations. In the first chapter, Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison explore how consumer search in a technology-mediated marketplace can affect the incentives for firms to engage in price obfuscation. In the second chapter, Aaron Chatterji focuses on the role of innovation in American primary and secondary education (K–12), emphasizing recent evidence on the efficacy of classroom technologies. The third chapter, by economic sociologist Olav Sorenson, considers how information, influence, and resources flow through innovation networks. The last two chapters focus on how corporate organizational structures influence innovation and dynamism. In the fourth chapter, Andreas Nilsson and David Robinson develop a synthetic framework for understanding the emergence and choices of social entrepreneurs and socially responsible firms. In the fifth chapter, Steven Kaplan argues that there is little empirical evidence to support the common claim that investor pressure for short-term financial results leads U.S. companies to systematically underinvest in long-term capital expenditures and R&D.