Empirical analysis of a sample of companies with private equity (PE) ownership in the UK shows that PE firms act as deep-pocket investors for their portfolio companies, rescuing them if they fall in financial distress.…Read More
Although the relationship between competition and firm innovation has long been of scholarly interest, prior research has predominantly considered changes in internal research and development (R&D) as a strategic response to competitors’ actions.…Read More
This paper addresses the recent trend of offering unlimited vacation to employees. While potentially useful for acquiring human capital benefits, unlimited vacation is a risky perk for firms due to the possibility of abuse.…Read More
Most digital communication platforms store content and allow users to see it multiple times. Despite the benefits that recording content holds for both users and companies, many applications delete it after it was seen by the receiver (i.e., ephemeral communication channels). …Read More
Commuting is costly for employees, but is it costly for employers in terms of lost productivity? We study the causal effects of commuting distance on inventor productivity. Specifically, we estimate how inventor productivity changes when their employer relocates.…Read More
Advances in intelligent technologies change the way consumers search and shop for products. Emerging is the trend of home-shopping devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which allow consumers to search or order products using voice commands.…Read More
Mergers and acquisitions are rapidly transforming the organization of physician services in the United States, raising concerns over the cost and the quality of health care. This paper studies how medical practice acquisitions by Physician Practice Management Companies (PPMCs) impact physician behavior and patient health.…Read More
In today’s connected world, individuals are no longer mere consumers of goods, information and services, but public producers of often valuable data. In fact, personal data is becoming such a core input that The Economist called it “the world’s most valuable resource” ahead of oil.…Read More
This study aims to measure the impact of General Data Protection Regulations on firms and consumers. Specifically, we plan to document GDPR’s impact on consumers search and discovery of products, and firm’s ability to reach out and sell to a broad set of consumers.…Read More
As VC firms have an acute interest in high-tech companies, they potentially bear substantial risk of patent litigation. In this project, we aim at looking into the following questions: how do ex-ante and ex-post patent litigation risks affect VC firms’ investment strategies and how those risks is propagated among all portfolio companies they have invested?…Read More
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in the global economy and has transformed many business practices. As AI has advanced beyond the conventionally narrow domains, it is starting to exhibit characteristics of “general purpose technologies (GPT)” that are expected to change the nature of more business innovations and reduce their associated financial costs and time.…Read More
We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.…Read More
Emerging technologies are an important driver of economic growth. However, the process of their emergence may not only be characterized by technological progress but also by setbacks. We offer a perspective on technology emergence that explicitly incorporates setbacks into the technology’s evolution and explains how industry participants may react to setbacks in emerging technologies.…Read More
This paper focuses on promoting the sustainability of renewable energy ecosystems to ensure socio-economic development. This is critical for emerging economies where rising demand for energy is likely to deplete resources rapidly.…Read More
Technological innovation is changing the landscape of many industries, and automotive telematics devices are perhaps the most disruptive technology for the auto insurance industry and most automotive manufacturers have plans to develop telematics. Moreover, a number of startup companies use telematics devices in various applications. …Read More
A recent rapid-automation movement has been displacing routine labor and has sparked a series of discussions about taxation on automation such as a robot tax. However, the government’s dilemma is that the planner may want to tax such physical capital that displaces routine labor for redistributive motives but does not want to tax other physical capital that increases such workers’ productivities.…Read More
Uber. Upwork. TaskRabbit. The world of work is transforming and my research agenda attempts to identify and explain 1) how work is changing and 2) how these changes affect workers, especially those who are marginalized or vulnerable.…Read More
In this paper, we explore how an industry’s watershed moments – vivid, publically salient, emotionally resonant events – can drive the emergence of a new market. Our empirical context is the New Space market, a growing number of new, private companies developing and using spaceflight-access technologies. …Read More
Market thickness is a key parameter that can make or break a platform’s business model. Thicker markets can offer more opportunities for participants to meet and higher chances that a potential match would exist. …Read More
I exploit unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing techniques to elicit the risk factors that firms themselves identify in their annual reports. I quantify the firms’ exposure to each identified risk, design an econometric test to classify them as either systematic or idiosyncratic, and construct factor mimicking portfolios that proxy for each undiversifiable source of risk.…Read More
