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Publications
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- 2025
- Working Paper
New Economic Forces Behind the Value Distribution of Innovation
By: Timothy F. Bresnahan, Shane Greenstein and Pai-Ling Yin
Advances in a general-purpose technology (GPT) enable many firms to invent complementary inventions, or co-inventions, making the GPT more valuable. This study examines the empirical implications of a straightforward model in which firms choose either incremental or... View Details
- July–August 2025
- Article
Beefing IT Up for Your Investor? Engagement with Open Source Communities, Innovation, and Startup Funding: Evidence from GitHub
By: Annamaria Conti, Christian Peukert and Maria P. Roche
We study the engagement of nascent firms with open source communities and its implications for innovation and attracting funding. To do so, we link data on 160,065 U.S. startups from Crunchbase to their activities on the open source software development platform... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Designing Consent: Choice Architecture and Consumer Welfare in Data Sharing
By: Chiara Farronato, Audrey Fradkin and Tesary Lin
We study the welfare consequences of choice architecture for online privacy using a field experiment that randomizes cookie consent banners. We study three ways in which firms or policymakers can influence choices: (1) nudging users through banner design to encourage... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Productivity Beliefs and Efficiency in Science
By: Fabio Bertolotti, Kyle R. Myers and Wei Yang Tham
We develop a method to estimate producers’ productivity beliefs in settings where output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate allocative efficiency in the market for science. Our model of researchers’ labor supply shows that their... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Scale AI Scales Up
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Scale AI, the data labeling and AI infrastructure company, had grown rapidly since it was founded in 2016; however, as Scale’s generative AI business was taking off, Alexandr Wang, Scale’s founder and CEO, became concerned that Scale was slowing down. Wang and the... View Details
Keywords: Technology And Innovation Management; Entrepreneur; Managing Growth; Hiring; Generative Ai; Data Labeling; Scale; AI and Machine Learning; Entrepreneurship; Talent and Talent Management; Growth Management; Leadership; Organizational Culture; Business Startups; Selection and Staffing; Technology Industry; United States
- 2025
- Working Paper
Small Business Innovation Applied to National Needs
By: Kyle Myers, Lauren Lanahan and Evan E. Johnson
Small businesses have long supplied a disproportionate share of major innovations in the United States. We review a centerpiece policy on this topic: the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. We trace its legislative history and summarize program... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
How Firms Respond to Worker Activism: Evidence from Global Supply Chains
By: Yanhua Bird, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Social movement pressures can lead organizations to concede and improve social performance to avoid disruption costs, but we theorize that such responses evoke concession costs that prompt organizations to shift resources and attention from other social domains whose... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Gender Diversity Performance and Voluntary Disclosure: Mind the (Gender Pay) Gap
By: June Huang and Shirley Lu
We study whether voluntary gender diversity disclosure is predictive of gender diversity performance. Exploiting a mandate in the United Kingdom that requires firms to disclose 2017 gender pay gap ("GPG") data for the first time, we find that providing voluntary gender... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Riding the Passion Wave or Fighting to Stay Afloat? A Theory of Differentiated Passion Contagion
By: Emma Frank, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Prior research suggests that employees benefit from highly passionate teammates because passion spreads easily from one employee to the next. We develop theory to propose that life in high-passion teams may not be as uniformly advantageous as previously assumed. We... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Trade Within Multinational Boundaries
By: Laura Alfaro, Paola Conconi, Fariha Kamal and Zachary Kroff
We leverage newly linked data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to study transactions within U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs). We show that using administrative data on intrafirm trade allows us to correct for measurement error... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Bank Financing of Global Supply Chains
By: Laura Alfaro, Mariya Brussevich, Camelia Minoiu and Andrea Presbitero
Finding new international suppliers is costly, so most importers source inputs from a single country. We examine the role of banks in mitigating trade search costs during the 2018–2019 U.S.-China trade tensions. We match data on shipments to U.S. ports with the U.S.... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs
By: Mengjie Cheng, Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan
We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York... View Details
- March–April 2025
- Article
Strategy in an Era of Abundant Expertise: How to Thrive When AI Makes Knowledge and Know-How Cheaper and Easier to Access
By: Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, John Corwin, Yang Li and Karim R. Lakhani
The AI era is in its early stages, and the technology is evolving extremely quickly. Providers are rapidly introducing AI "copilots," "bots," and "assistants" into applications to augment employees' workflows. Examples include GitHub Copilot for coding, ServiceNow... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Prices and Concentration: A U-shape? Theory and Evidence from Renewables
By: Michele Fioretti, Junnan He and Jorge Tamayo
We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost
capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies
while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader
to expand output and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Training Within Firms
By: Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo
Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their
implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement.
This study uses data from three firms–a car manufacturer, a quick-service... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
Corporate Ownership and ESG Performance
By: Belén Villalonga, Peter Tufano and Boya Wang
Using a sample of 3083 firms from 62 countries over 18 years, we analyze how the structure and identity of firms' material owners influence their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. We find that firms with founding families or other individual... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation
By: Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon M. Phillips, Francisca Rebelo and Benjamin Sampson
We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new
database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To
guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Transferability MATTRs: Towards Understanding Antecedents of Strategic Licensing
By: Dafna F. Bearson and Maria P. Roche
This paper examines the antecedents of firms’ decisions to license intellectual property
(IP). We propose a conceptual framework emphasizing two critical factors: (1) transferability,
which we define as the ease of moving knowledge embodied in inventions across
firm... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Differentiating on Diversity: How Disclosing Workforce Diversity Influences Consumer Choice
By: Maya Balakrishnan, Jimin Nam and Ryan W. Buell
Companies are facing increased pressure to “walk the talk” on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their operations. One specific call-to-action from stakeholders is the public disclosure of EEO-1s. Companies with 100+ employees are federally mandated to annually... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Blockchain Adoption and Audit Quality
By: Mei Luo, Daniel Rabetti and Shuangchen Yu
This study examines the impact of blockchain adoption in the corporate setting. Specifically, we provide comprehensive empirical support to recent theory (Cao, Cong, and Young, 2024) proposing that blockchain adoption positively affects endogenous audit quality and... View Details