Risk Factors That Matter: Textual Analysis of Risk Disclosures for the Cross-Section of Returns

Working Papers

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

Entrepreneur’s Knowledge, Firm Survival, and the Normalized Burn Rate

Working Papers

We study the association of spending per employee with startup firm survival. Our theory model posits that entrepreneur’s knowledge defines the complex decision process of combining human and non-human inputs to increase firm value. Read More

Data Analytics Supports Decentralized Innovation

Published Research

Data-analytics technology can accelerate the innovation process by enabling existing knowledge to be identified, accessed, combined, and deployed to address new problem domains.Read More

In the Shadow of the Valley: Private Equity Firms’ Increased Prominence in High-Tech Acquisitions

Funded Research Proposal

Why and how do private equity (PE) firms engage in technology acquisitions, and how do they create and capture value in these transactions? Observational data shows initial evidence that not only are PE firms engaging in an increasing number of technology buyouts, they are also seemingly behaving in distinct ways from both corporate acquirers, as well as PE firms in industries other than high-tech.Read More

What is the Importance of Pivoting for Firm Growth?

Funded Research Proposal

Does pivoting matter? How does it affect investment in innovation and firm performance? My goal is to analyze the relevance of pivoting for the development of a small firm into a mature one and to provide a better understanding of what constitutes a small firm.Read More

Leapfrogging for Last-Mile Delivery in Health Care

Funded Research Proposal

Lowering the cost and increasing the speed of last mile delivery are major challenges for the distribution channels of most industries. These challenges are even more severe in developing countries, where a large part of the population is located in rural areas, and where the lack of physical infrastructure results in a sizable part of the population residing in isolated areas, compromising their access to important services for their investment in human capital, such as timely health care.Read More

Corporate Venture Capital and Entrepreneurial Product Development

Funded Research Proposal

Increasingly, corporations are investing in entrepreneurial firms. This trend has not been overlooked by researchers in the management literature, but the majority of research studying the effects of corporate venture capital (CVC) overwhelmingly takes the perspective of the organization with the venture capital operation. Read More

The Influence of Private Equity Experience on Corporate Transactions

Funded Research Proposal

This project considers whether CEOs and other top managers whose professional backgrounds are in private equity undertake different and/or more successful acquisitions and divestitures than CEOs and other top managers who do not have professional backgrounds in private equity.Read More

Race to E-Commerce: The Role of Firm Owners in Technology Adoption

Funded Research Proposal

This study aims to understand how firm ownership and governance influence the adoption of disruptive technologies in the early stages of the technology cycle. There is a growing recognition that owners have different goals and motivations that in turn, shape the strategic direction of the firms they control.Read More

Generic Competition and Strategic Delegation: An Empirical Study in Drug Patent Licensing

Funded Research Proposal

We plan to study the role of strategic delegation in the patent licensing process. In particular, we will examine the contractual terms of a large database of pharmaceutical drug license arrangements (royalty rates, contingencies, royalty bases, etc…), as well as which contractual terms were redacted versus non-redacted.Read More

The Added Value of Analytics and Impact of Exposure to Business Benchmarks

Funded Research Proposal

What is the impact of deploying an analytics solution on firm output? How is this impact generated by the firm? We use data from over 1,000 firms to estimate the causal impact of analytics and benchmarking on firm performance.Read More

Gender Differences in Founder’s HR Strategy and What Works When? Evidence from New Ventures in Innovation Industries

Funded Research Proposal

This project examines gender differences in founder’s human resource (HR) strategy and how such differences impact business outcomes, focusing on nascent ventures in high-tech innovative industries.Read More

Technological Innovations for Last-Mile Delivery in Health Care

Funded Research Proposal

We propose to study the impact of technological innovations in last-mile delivery on health care access, cost, and quality. To this end, we will examine the introduction of drones to deliver blood and other medical supplies to isolated areas in Rwanda.Read More

Situating the Construct of Lean Start-Up: Adjacent Conversations and Possible Future Directions

Published Research

The lean start-up approach has garnered tremendous amount of interest in recent years and has become mainstream among entrepreneurs. However, this practitioners’ conversation has been largely decoupled from the broader academic literature in management and technology strategy. Read More

Unlocking Value from Startups’ Ties to Established Firms: The Role of the Entrepreneurs’ Background

Working Papers

Evidence on whether startups benefit from corporate venture capital investment is equivocal. Research suggests that the principal impediment to value creation in these relationships for startups is the complexity of the larger organization – the varying incentive structures, layers of bureaucracy and convoluted decision-making processes that limit their access to valuable resources. Read More

Pursuing the New While Sustaining the Current: Incumbent Strategies and Firm Value During the Nascent Period of Industry Change

Published Research

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

Pipes or Shackles? How Ties to Incumbents Shape Startup Innovation

Working Papers

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