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- April 2021
- Article
Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson
An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Hester Pharmaceuticals (A): A Pricing Dilemma
By: Dante Roscini and John Masko
In August 2019, the leadership of Hester Pharmaceuticals (Hester) had a problem. Italy promised to be a key market for their new breakthrough oncology drug Akrozumab, but for almost two years, its single-payer healthcare system had been unable to agree with Hester on a... View Details
Keywords: Macroeconomics; Trade; Price; Global Range; Global Strategy; Globalized Markets and Industries; Health Care and Treatment; Patents; Monopoly; Negotiation; Business and Government Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Human Needs; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Pharmaceutical Industry; Italy
- January 2021
- Article
Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?
By: Hongyu Xiao, Andy Wu and Jaeho Kim
We estimate the causal effect of workplace–home commuting distance on inventor productivity. We construct a novel panel of U.S. inventors with precisely measured workplace–home distances and inventor-level productivity. Our identification strategy exploits firm office... View Details
- December 2020
- Article
Different Founders, Different Firms: A Comparative Analysis of Academic and Non-academic Startups
By: Maria P. Roche, Annamaria Conti and Frank T. Rothaermel
What role do differences in founders' occupational backgrounds play in new venture performance? Analyzing a novel dataset of 2,998 founders creating 1,723 innovative startups in biomedicine, we find that the likelihood and hazard of achieving a liquidity event are... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Hillel Rapoport
We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold... View Details
- November–December 2020
- Article
Our Work-from-Anywhere Future
The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: Evidence from Green Patenting
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Quoc H. Nguyen
No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the highest. In this paper, we document a strong empirical pattern in green patent... View Details
- October 2020
- Article
The Supply Chain Economy: A New Industry Categorization for Understanding Innovation in Services
By: Mercedes Delgado and Karen G. Mills
An active debate has centered on the importance of manufacturing for driving innovation in the U.S. economy. This paper offers an alternative framework that focuses on the role of suppliers of goods and services (the “supply chain economy”) in national performance. We... View Details
- Article
Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Patents
By: David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu
Manufacturing accounts for more than three-quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The competitive shock to this sector emanating from China's economic ascent could in theory either augment or stifle U.S. innovation. Using three decades of U.S. patents matched to corporate... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Machine Learning and Human Capital Complementarities: Experimental Evidence on Bias Mitigation
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Evan Starr and Rajshree Agarwal
The use of machine learning (ML) for productivity in the knowledge economy requires considerations of important biases that may arise from ML predictions. We define a new source of bias related to incompleteness in real time inputs, which may result from strategic... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
Intra-firm Geographic Mobility: Value Creation Mechanisms and Future Research Directions
This paper argues that intra-firm geographic mobility is an understudied mechanism that can help mitigate coordination failures in a geographically distributed organization. The paper presents an organizing framework on how intra-firm geographic mobility creates value... View Details
- Summer 2020
- Article
Tech Clusters
By: William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud
Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Inventor Gender and the Direction of Invention
By: Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila and John-Paul Ferguson
We study whether increasing the share of female inventors leads to more biomedical inventions that focus on the needs of women. After accounting for detailed disease-technology, disease-year, and technology-year fixed effects, we find that a 10 percentage point... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How Resilient Is Venture-Backed Innovation? Evidence from Four Decades of U.S. Patenting
By: Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda and Richard Townsend
Despite theoretical predictions to the contrary, corporate innovation is strongly pro-cyclical. In this paper, we compare innovation in the economy as a whole to that of firms backed by venture capital (VC), a source of capital associated with the most impactful young... View Details
- April 2020
- Article
Technological Leadership (de)Concentration: Causes in Information and Communication Technology Equipment
By: Yasin Ozcan and Shane Greenstein
Using patent data from 1976 to 2010 as indicators of inventive activity, we determine the concentration level of where inventive ideas originate and then examine how and why those concentrations change over time. The analysis finds pervasive deconcentration in every... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Do Managers Matter? A Natural Experiment from 42 R&D Labs in India
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Christos A. Makridis
We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India’s 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab... View Details
- January 2020
- Case
The Origins of Bell Labs
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
In 1947, scientists at Bell Labs invented the transistor—a tiny signal amplifier that would go on to become the fundamental building block of the digital age. But, confounding most traditional economic assumptions, it was not a vigorous startup that made this momentous... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) in the intellectual-property space. We find that, on average, NPEs appear to behave as opportunistic “patent trolls.” NPEs sue cash-rich firms and target cash in... View Details