Publications

Register to Read

January 8, 2010
Other Article

Multinational Firms, Agglomeration, and Global Networks

By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie Chen

Agglomeration effects are important but difficult to measure. This column uses a new database with precise geographical information to investigate the locational interdependence of multinational firms. Knowledge spillovers and capital- and labour-market externalities... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Business Subsidiaries; Industry Clusters; Multinational Firms and Management; Network Effects

We explore the impact of geographically bounded intra-firm spillovers (internal agglomeration economies) and geographically bounded inter-firm spillovers (external agglomeration economies) on firms’ location strategies. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal... View Details

2024
Working Paper

The Pay of Finance Professors

By: Claire Célérier, Boris Vallée and Alexey Vasilenko

This paper documents the existence of a significant wage finance premium in academia, and investigates its underlying mechanism. By exploiting an extensive dataset covering wages, publications and socio-demographics for 60,000 public-university faculty from all fields,... View Details

Keywords: Finance Wage Premium; Finance Academia; Wages; Higher Education

March 2013
Case

Currency Wars

By: Laura Alfaro and Hilary White

In February 2013, the G-20 finance ministers met in Moscow, Russia to discuss the rising anxieties over a potential international currency war. It was speculated that certain countries were purposely devaluing their currencies in order to improve their competitiveness... View Details

Keywords: Currency; Competitiveness; Trade Policy; Devaluation; Exchange Rate; Monetary Policy; Quantitative Easing; Inflation Targeting; Capital Flows; Central Banking; Currency Exchange Rate; Competitive Strategy; Emerging Markets; Policy; Trade; Conflict and Resolution; Banking Industry; Public Administration Industry; Moscow

Educators

Purchase

June 2014
Article

Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Funds

By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam

We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant... View Details

Keywords: Money Market Mutual Funds; European Sovereign Debt Crisis; Runs; Contagion; Risk Taking; Investment Funds; Financial Crisis; Europe

2024
Working Paper

The Value of AI Innovations

By: Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, Terrence Tianshuo Shi and Suraj Srinivasan

We study the value of AI innovations as it diffuses across general and application sectors, using the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) AI patent dataset. Investors value these innovations more than others, as AI patents exhibit a 9% value premium,... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Valuation; Technological Innovation; Open Source Distribution; Patents; Policy; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Industry

2013
Working Paper

Digital Dark Matter and the Economics of Apache

By: Shane Greenstein and Frank Nagle

Researchers have long hypothesized that spillovers from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Internet and the Web; Performance Productivity; Applications and Software; Economic Growth; Research and Development

Greater job mobility among engineers and scientists has caused the extended social networks of inventors to become increasingly connected. Firms that operate within small worlds such as in Silicon Valley long ago learned to manage invention in an... View Details

Research Summary

The Global Networks of Multinational Firms (with Maggie Chen)

By: Laura Alfaro

In this paper we characterize the topology of global multinational networks and examine the macro and micro patterns of multinational activity. We construct indices of network density at both pairwise industry and establishment level and measure agglomeration in a... View Details

2024
Working Paper

The Wandering Scholars: Understanding the Heterogeneity of University Commercialization

By: Josh Lerner, Henry Manley, Carolyn Stein and Heidi Williams

University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of commercial innovation and economic growth. Yet at the same time, there have been long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential social... View Details

Keywords: Research; Higher Education; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention

16 Jul 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Selection, Reallocation, and Spillover: Identifying the Sources of Gains from Multinational Production

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro & Maggie X. Chen

2023
Working Paper

Local Shocks and Internal Migration: The Disparate Effects of Robots and Chinese Imports in the U.S.

By: Marius Faber, Andres Sarto and Marco Tabellini

Do local labor markets adjust to economic shocks through migration? In this paper, we study this question by focusing on two of the most important shocks that hit U.S. manufacturing since the 1990s: Chinese import competition and the introduction of industrial robots.... View Details

Keywords: Migration; Employment; Information Technology; Trade; System Shocks; United States

I measure the spillover effect of intercollegiate athletics on the quantity and quality of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States, popularly known as the "Flutie Effect." I treat athletic success as a stock of goodwill that decays over... View Details

09 Apr 2025
HBS Seminar

Marc Rysman, Boston University

13 Sep 2018
HBS Seminar

Ashley Swanson, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania

U.S. Monetary Policy and Emerging Markets Credit Cycles

Foreign banks’ lending to firms in emerging market economies is large and denominated predominantly in U.S. dollars. This creates a direct connection between U.S. monetary policy and EME credit cycles. We estimate that over a typical U.S. monetary easing cycle, EME... View Details

May 2021
Article

Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics

By: Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou and Joshua Krieger

Investment in intangible capital such as R&D has increased dramatically since the 1990s. However, productivity growth remains sluggish in recent years. One potential reason is that a significant share of the increase in intangible investment is geared toward consumer... View Details

Keywords: Drug Development; Research and Development; Investment Return; Demographics; Pharmaceutical Industry