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The literature on patent buyouts has focused on single-economy settings, where buyouts are welfare improving relative to patents unless there are frictions such as imperfect information or commitment problems. We expand the analysis to a world with two heterogeneous countries featuring different sizes and innovation capacities. Moving to an international setting introduces the tradeoff that buyouts help to reduce monopoly distortion but also eliminate profits from foreign markets. We show that this can rationalize why buyouts are not pursued even in the absence of information and commitment problems, and identify the conditions under which this is harmful to global welfare. Instead, countries in the model rely on a system of global patent protection paired with domestic price subsidies, and only intersovereign transfers can achieve a globally optimal buyout equilibrium. Our results suggest that buyouts are constrained not only by domestic frictions but also by a global public good dimension.

Information problems are pervasive in developing economies and can hinder productivity growth. This paper studies how much rural producers in developing countries can learn from their own experience to redress important information gaps. It builds a model of learning from experience and applies it using a rich dataset on cotton farmers in Pakistan. I test whether farmers learn from cultivation experience about the pest resistance of their seeds and use this information to improve selection and productivity. I find no such learning effect and this conclusion is robust to several parameters that could signal learning. The findings document the difficulty of parsing out and processing information from cultivation experience alone and point to the importance of information provision to producers by the government or external agencies.

This dissertation uses microeconomics to study questions of learning and conflict in developing countries. The first essay studies how much rural producers in developing countries can learn from their own experience to redress important information gaps about their crop. It builds a theoretical model of learning from experience and applies it using a rich dataset on cotton farmers in Pakistan. I test whether farmers learn from cultivation experience about the pest resistance of their seeds and use this information to improve selection and productivity. I find no such learning effect and this conclusion is robust to several parameters that could signal learning. The findings document the difficulty of parsing out information from cultivation experience alone and point to the importance of external information provision by the government in these contexts. The second essay studies how firms can learn from cumulative production experience to improve productivity and competitiveness, also known as learning by doing. It argues that learning by doing may be particularly important in a development context but that its popular conceptualization in the growth literature, as a passive process in which higher output automatically improves productivity, falls short in some important ways. I review case studies on firm behavior to show that a more active process, in which workers must exert costly effort to learn from trial and error, is a better approximation of how experience improves productivity. I compare this type of learning, which I term effortful learning by doing, to other types of knowledge acquisition, and use qualitative evidence to demonstrate its relevance to productivity growth in developing country firms. The third essay studies the ongoing absence of a solution in Israel-Palestine through the lens of game theory. It shows that the game theoretic literature on the conflict largely relies on unsupported assumptions about what the main actors are trying to achieve. Specifically, a historical analysis of Israel's settlement policy suggests that Israel is not strategically interested in withdrawing from the occupied territories in a ``land for peace'' deal, contrary to what most formal models assume. I show that integrating alternative, more historically plausible, assumptions into a game can generate results mirroring the settler-expansion of the Israeli state and help explain the deteriorating prospects for a solution.

Why have Israel and the Palestinians failed to implement a “land for peace” solution, along the lines of the Oslo Accords? This paper studies the application of game theory to this question. I show that existing models of the conflict largely rely on unrealistic assumptions about what the main actors are trying to achieve. Specifically, they assume that Israel is strategically interested in withdrawing from the occupied territories pending resolvable security concerns but that it is obstructed from doing so by violent Palestinians with other objectives. I use historical analysis along with bargaining theory to shed doubt on this assumption, and to argue that the persistence of conflict has been aligned with, not contrary to, the interests of the militarily powerful party, Israel.