The Welfare Effect of Gender-Inclusive Intellectual Property Creation: Evidence from Books

Joel Waldfogel

No 30987, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men. Book authorship is now an exception. In 1970, women published a third as many books as men. By 2020, women produced the majority of books. Adding new products can have significant welfare benefits, particularly when product quality is unpredictable. Using data on sales of 8.9 million individual titles at Amazon, 2018-2021, along with information on 200 million ratings of 1.8 million books by 800,000 Goodreads users, I develop measures of both the supply of new books by male and female authors, as well as their usage by heterogeneous consumers. I show that growth in female-authored books has delivered a roughly equal proportionate increase in the female-authored shares of consumption, book awards, and other measures of success, indicating both that the additional female-authored books are useful to consumers and that product quality is unpredictable. I calibrate a simple structural model of demand with unpredictable product quality to quantify the welfare benefit from the additional female-authored books. While revenue gains to female authors come partly at the expense of male authors, gains to consumers from inclusive innovation are experienced by a wide range of consumers.

JEL-codes: J16 L82 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-gen, nep-ind, nep-ipr and nep-lab
Note: IO PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30987.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30987

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30987

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().