Petra Moser

Petra Moser is an economist and economic historian serving as a Professor of Economics at the New York University Stern School of Business. Her work examines the origins of creativity and innovation. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Tübingen. For her work, she received the Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, awarded by the Economic History Association to the best dissertation in economic history on an area outside the United States or Canada. From 2005 to 2006, she was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She subsequently joined Stanford University as an Assistant Professor of Economics.

In addition to her academic appointment, Moser is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research and Center for Economic and Policy Research. From 2018-2021 she was on the board of the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She was a fellow at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where she was mentored by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.

Moser is fluent in German and English, with additional proficiency in Spanish, French, Italian, and Latin.

World's fairs Moser's dissertation research examined the effects of patent laws on downstream innovation using data from the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Moser shows that countries with stronger patent laws featured inventions across a wider diversity of industries than their counterparts with weaker enforcement. In particular, Moser shows that small European countries such as Switzerland with limited patent enforcement focused on scientific instruments, whose production process was easier to guard as trade secrets. Moser leverages the staggered introduction of copyright laws in Italian states over the course of the Napoleonic invasion of Italy to study the effects of intellectual property enforcement on opera. She finds that the introduction of copyright laws increased the number of operas per year by 121%. The research has been cited as evidence for the importance of strong intellectual property enforcement in fostering creativity. Moser shows that United States patenting in subfields of chemistry covered by German-Jewish emigrants during World War II increased by 31% relative to the fields of other German scientists.

Leveraging a similar methodological approach, Moser shows with Shmuel San that reductions in immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in response to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924 decreased patenting by U.S. scientists in the fields covered by those immigrants by almost 60%.