Wharton doctoral candidate Alejandro Lopez-Lira used machine learning to analyze companies’ annual reports and assess the top four systematic risks that affect most firms. …Read More
Using a Company’s Own Words to Assess Its Risks
Innovation Opportunities and Risks
Big Pushes, Little Hollywoods: Local Economic Development Effects of Film Tax Credit Lotteries
The extent to which local incentive policies (such as subsidies and tax credits) are effective at spurring new centers of innovation, and whether these incentives induce overall productivity growth or just a shift of production from one region to another, is the subject of this proposal.…Read More
Firm Responsiveness to Location Subsidies: Regression Discontinuity Estimates from a Tax Credit Formula
In 2011, California Governor Jerry Brown recognized several of the state’s existing firm incentive policies aimed at catalyzing innovative activity in the state, to be ineffectual, citing poor incentive design.…Read More
Blockchain and the Value of Operational Transparency
The project aims to explore the extent to which blockchain technology can be ported to alleviate information asymmetry issues in the context of supply chain financing. In particular, firms seeking the capital needed to efficiently run their operations are often impeded by severe information asymmetry issues. …Read More
Pursuing the New While Sustaining the Current: Incumbent Strategies and Firm Value During the Nascent Period of Industry Change
This study considers the nascent period of industry change when the prevalent business model is being threatened by a new model, but there is significant uncertainty with respect to whether and when the new model will dominate. …Read More
Frenemies: The Influence of Competitors’ Cooperation on Technological Adoption
The development and adoption of new innovative technologies confront firms into making decisions in highly uncertain environment. Past experience and the available public information are seldom sufficient to support firms in their decision process; firms ability to experiment and produce new information is then paramount. …Read More
Responses to Rival Exit: Product Variety, Market Expansion, and Preexisting Market Structure
This study investigates incumbent responses to a main rival’s exit. We argue that long‐time rivals have developed an equilibrium by offering a mix of overlapping and unique products and by choosing geographic proximity to each other. A rival’s exit, however, disrupts this equilibrium and motivates surviving firms to expand in both product and geographic spaces to seek a new equilibrium. …Read More
Pipes or Shackles? How Ties to Incumbents Shape Startup Innovation
Startups are increasingly turning to the incumbent firms in their industries for venture capital. However, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of how these relationships influence the way they innovate. …Read More
Better Sales Forecasting: Why the Crowd Outperforms the “Expert with the Eye”
The ability to predict consumer preferences for new fashions by clothing manufacturer executives seems rather low. This is confirmed by secondary data on inventory markdowns and our pilot interviews with major manufacturers. …Read More
Leaps in Innovation: The Bolt versus Bannister Effect in Algorithmic Tournaments
This paper explores whether innovation breakthroughs stimulate or impede future progress in individual innovation. On the one hand, one could argue that substantial improvements to the status quo might inspire advances through competition.…Read More
The Downside of Applying Lean Startup Principles
Lean startup principles have fueled a revolution in business and entrepreneurship, but there is a downside to early market testing, according to new Wharton research.…Read More
Firm Scope and Spillovers From New Product Innovation: Evidence From Medical Devices
When firms span related product categories, spillovers across categories become central to firm strategy and industrial policy, due to their potential to foreclose competition and affect innovation incentives. …Read More
Trade Secrets and Innovation: Evidence from the “Inevitable Disclosure” Doctrine
Does heightened employer‐friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state‐level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would “inevitably disclose” trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual‐level patenting outcomes. …Read More
Optimal Network Design for Inducing Effort
Many companies create and manage communities where consumers observe and exchange information about the effort expended by other consumers. Such communities are especially popular in the areas of fitness, education, dieting, and financial savings. …Read More
Imprinting and Early Exposure to Developed International Markets: The Case of the New Multinationals
Previous research has analyzed the imprinting effect associated with the firm’s international expansion without considering the full range of differences between home and host countries. These differences are important because, depending on the development gap, and the direction of the difference, learning opportunities and the possibility of upgrading firm’s capabilities will be vastly different. …Read More
New Barriers to New Work? Evidence from Job Transitions in the Innovation Economy
The modern knowledge economy depends crucially on innovation, but adaptation to innovation has been linked to economic ills such as wage inequality, skill polarization, and geographic divergence. Between 2000 and 2016 alone, the U.S. shed approximately 6 million manufacturing jobs largely as a result of increasing pressure from automation and international trade.…Read More
New Technologies in Elder Care
This study of new technologies in elder care is a multi-faceted project designed to better understand technological adoption both by elder-care institutions such as Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) and elderly individuals in their homes. …Read More
The Impact of Funding Sources on the Rate and Direction of Academic Biomedical Innovation
Given the large and growing role of academic entrepreneurs and inventors via patents, start-up development, and university-industry relationships, understanding how funding sources may impact academic scientists’ incentives is a crucial area for innovation research, particularly in the biomedical sciences. …Read More
Economic Nationalism, Productivity and Innovation: Evidence from a Developing Country
Economic nationalism is an ideology which favors policies that emphasize domestic control of the economy. Previous work has documented that firm innovation/investment and firm productivity are important for economic growth. Hence, understanding how barriers to firm innovation/investment and restrictions on firm productivity is crucial to the study of development. …Read More
Standing by the Giants or Escaping the Battlefield: The Effect of FDI on Local Firm Creation – Evidence from China
What’s the effect of FDI on firms in cities receiving foreign investment? Agglomerating or crowding out? This paper tries to answer this question by studying local firm creation using Chinese Business Registration data. …Read More