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
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
What is the effect of housing supply regulations on innovation? Just as innovation has become increasingly localized, restrictive local building policies are cited as the cause of skyrocketing housing prices in American cities; yet evidence is limited on the effect of such policies. …Read More
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
How do social interactions shape collective action, and how are they mediated by the availability of networked information technologies? To answer these questions, we study the Temperance Crusade, one of the earliest instances of organized political mobilization by women in the U.S. …Read More
Some firms in the technology sector choose to cooperate with competitors (“co-opetition”) in Standards Setting Organizations (SSOs). These SSOs create technology standards that facilitate rapid market penetration of new technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Blue-Ray. …Read More
This proposal explores how information technology and innovation in digitization affect organizational structure. Similar to earlier wave of IT adoption that substituted certain routine tasks, we plan to use the Workplace and Employee Survey from Canada to show that this new wave digitization and IT investments can induce a structural change in organizational hierarchies that differ from prior technologies. …Read More
I examine how investing in innovation affects CEO termination. Theory argues that firms investing in innovation will reduce their propensity to terminate their CEOs to encourage risk taking and long-term thinking.…Read More
The growth of the global technology industry drives the migration of skilled labor towards countries like the United States that can utilize it, but the U.S. limits the immigration of skilled workers that are employed domestically by U.S. firms. Proponents argue skilled immigration allows firms to access technical skills that unavailable domestically and promote innovation, but there is little evidence of whether this firm-level effect exists.…Read More
This paper examines how past effort can impact subsequent effort, such as when effort is reduced following an interruption. I conducted 3 incentivized real-effort experiments in which both piece rates and leisure options were manipulated and find effort displays significant stickiness, even in the absence of switching costs.…Read More
Experimentation is the center of a fascinating debate among entrepreneurship practitioners. Inspired by the lean startup, much current practice advocates the intense use of experimentation. Conversely, a large entrepreneurship tradition emphasizes the importance of design and planning. …Read More
The performance of venture capital (VC) investments load positively on shocks to aggregate return volatility. I document this novel source of risk at the asset-class, fund, and portfolio-company levels. The positive relation between VC performance and volatility is driven by the option-like structure of VC investments, especially by VCs’ contractual option to reinvest.…Read More
Can machine learning techniques be used to predict high-impact, general technologies? We find that an ensemble of deep learning models that analyze both the text of patents as well as their bibliometric information can ex-ante identify such patents, accurately identifying 80 of the top 100 high generality patents in the hold-out sample. …Read More
Do workers have different equality preferences depending on the type of payoff? In many firms, the distribution of equity compensation is more equal than the distribution of salary. We design an experimental group production game to examine how workers respond to combinations of different distributions of equity and salary.…Read More
Firms commonly use disaggregated accounting information to facilitate efficient contracting over intangible assets. However, reliance on accounting measures creates information asymmetries and thus a role for contract audits.…Read More
Scholars have long recognized that individuals compare their rewards to those received by similar others and that satisfaction is determined, in part, by perceptions of (un)fairness that arise from these comparisons. Extensive research has also found that individuals frequently select others as pay referents who share the same race and the same gender, suggesting that demographic similarity strongly affects equity perceptions. …Read More
In this project, I want to study the financial intermediary’s impact on firm’s innovation. More specific, I want to study whether a firm can innovate more if its shares are heavily held by connected mutual funds. Here I define a mutual fund as connected if the mutual fund managers went to the same school as the top officers of the firm.…Read More
This paper examines how risk preferences differ over goods and in-kind monetary rewards. I study incentivized experiments in which subjects allocate bundles of either Amazon.com goods or Amazon.com gift credit (which must be spent immediately) across uncertain states. …Read More
We study information aggregation in organizational decision-making for the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We introduce a formal model of voting where agents face costly tacit information to improve their decision quality.…Read More
In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.…Read More
