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

Internal agglomeration and productivity: Evidence from microdata

Published Research

Evan Rawley, Associate Professor of Management, University of Connecticut, and Robert Seamans, Stern School of Business, NYU Abstract: We study how internal agglomeration—geographic clustering of business establishments owned by the same parent company—influences establishment productivity. Using Census microdata on the population of U.S. hotels from 1987-2007, we find that doubling theRead More

Big Pushes, Little Hollywoods: Local Economic Development Effects of Film Tax Credit Lotteries

Working Papers

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

Working Papers

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

Frenemies: The Influence of Competitors’ Cooperation on Technological Adoption

Working Papers

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

Economic Nationalism, Productivity and Innovation: Evidence from a Developing Country

Funded Research Proposal

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

Plant Operations and Product Recalls in the Automotive Industry: An Empirical Investigation

Published Research

While there is overwhelming support for the negative consequences of product recalls, empirical evidence of operational drivers of recalls is almost nonexistent. In this study, we identify product variety, plant variety, and capacity utilization as drivers of subsequent manufacturing-related recalls.Read More

Institutional Change and Productivity Growth in China’s Manufacturing: The Microeconomics of Knowledge Accumulation and “Creative Restructuring”

This article investigates the microeconomics underlying the spectacular growth of productivity in China’s manufacturing sector over the period 1998–2007. Underlying the aggregate evidence of such dramatic growth, one observes a large, albeit shrinking, intra-sectoral heterogeneity coupled with an even more important process of learning and knowledge accumulation.Read More

The Impact of New Product Introduction on Plant Productivity in the North American Automotive Industry

Published Research

Product launch—an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant—is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations, resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North American automotive plants from years 1999–2007, we estimate that a product launch entails an average productivity loss of 12%–15% at the plant level.Read More