Strategies for Innovating

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

We will examine the cost of inventor mobility from a talent poaching perspective. It is either prohibitively costly or impossible to contract over all states of the world (Grossman and Hart, 1986; Tirole, 1999). 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

The idea that source code for computer software be accessible to anyone has gained increasing popularity among software developers, fueling the rapid growth of the open source software (OSS) movement. Platforms for OSS development currently host incredibly valuable projects like the Linux kernel, TensorFlow and various blockchain software projects. Read More

The impostor phenomenon is the individual proclivity to believe that one has fooled those around them into adopting an overly positive view of oneself. Studies have shown that at least two out of five successful people have this proclivity. Read More

We examine how wealth windfalls affect self-employment decisions using data on cash payments from claims on Texas shale drilling to people throughout the United States. Individuals who receive large wealth shocks (greater than $50,000) have 51% higher self-employment rates. Read More

Prior research has argued and shown that firms with centralized R&D produce broader innovations relative to decentralized firms, but the organizational mechanisms underlying this relationship are underexplored. This gap limits our understanding of whether and how formal R&D structure can be used as a lever to influence research outcomes. 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 ...Read More

Traditional online platforms (e.g., Amazon Marketplace) use Unilateral Rating System (URS), where customers rate sellers. However, sharing economy platforms (e.g., Uber, Airbnb) have adopted Bilateral Rating System (BRS) that also allows service providers to rate customers, and even selects customers based on their ratings. 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 ...Read More