Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?

Published Research

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

Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential: Gender Differences in Communication and Investor Perceptions of Long-Term Growth and Scalability

Published Research

Across three studies, we examine how disparities in funding outcomes may be due to differences in how entrepreneurs communicate their ventures, whereby female entrepreneurs have a tendency to use more concrete language when describing their ventures than do their male counterparts.Read More

Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation

Published Research

How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? Although access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity of inventor-held knowledge within a given knowledge production team. Read More

Skilled Immigration and Firm-Level Innovation: The U.S. H-1B Lottery

Working Papers

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

Inequality Aversion When the Reward is Scarce: The Case of Salary vs. Equity Compensation

Working Papers

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

Organizational Decision-Making and Information: Angel Investments by Venture Capital Partners

Working Papers

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

Social Is the New Financial: How Startup Social Media Activity Influences Funding Outcomes

Working Papers

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

A Typology of R&D Processes Based on Market Excludability and Information Appropriability 

Working Papers

We explore the relationship between competition among downstream commercializing firms (e.g. incumbent pharmaceutical firms) and upstream innovative firms (e.g. startup biotechnology firms). We find that in an alliance regime, common in high technology industries, competition among the commercializing firms can reduce the productivity of the innovators, resulting in a net loss of societal welfare (e.g. less drugs invented and brought to market). Read More