Working Papers
“Brand Reallocation and Market Concentration” w/ Liangjie Wu, (SSRN Link)
We study the interaction of customer capital and productivity through brand reallocation across firms. We develop a firm dynamics model with brands as transferable customer capital, heterogeneous firm productivity, and variable markups. We study the matching process between transferable brand capital and core productivity, which can be inefficient with significant welfare implications. We link USPTO trademark data with Nielsen sales data to study the prevalence of brand reallocation and the response of sales and prices to reallocation. Quantitatively, brand reallocation reduces welfare. Optimal policies deviate substantially from the literature due to the complementarity between brand capital and productivity.
“Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth” w/ Ufuk Akcigit and Marta Prato. NBER Working Paper #27862 (forthcoming, Review of Economic Studies).
How do innovation and education policy affect individual career choices and aggregate productivity? This paper analyses the effect of R&D subsidies and higher education policy on productivity growth through the supply of innovative talent. We put scarce talent, higher education attainment, and career choice at the centre of a new endogenous growth framework with individual-level heterogeneity in talent, financial resources, and preferences. We link the model to micro-level data from Denmark on the backgrounds of who obtains a PhD and becomes an inventor and the outcomes of a set of policy interventions. We find that R&D subsidies can be strengthened when combined with higher education subsidies, which enable talented but poor youth to pursue a career in research. Education and innovation policies not only alleviate different frictions, but also impact innovation at different time horizons. Education policy is more effective in societies with higher income inequality.
“Idea Production and Team Structure” (2022 version)
Teamwork is the foundation of modern innovation. This paper builds a framework that quantifies the sources behind the rise of teams in innovation and produces a method for evaluating the effect of high-skilled immigration on aggregate innovation.
“The Patent Troll: Benign Middleman or Stick-Up Artist?” w/ David Abrams, Ufuk Akcigit, and Gokhan Oz. NBER Working Paper #25713
This paper embeds patent trolls into an endogenous growth model w/ patent exchange which we use to explore their role in a comprehensive dataset on patent trolls, including patent prices, licensing fees, and litigation.
“Market Power through the Lens of Trademarks” w/ Kyle Kost and Liangjie Wu
We apply a new dataset to evaluate the distribution of brands across firms, and show rising dynamism in trademark reallocation and response of sales and prices to transactions, providing a new empirical framework to study market power through trademark ownership.
“Firm-Inventor Links and the Composition of Innovation”
This paper examines how firm-inventor matching connects to the direction and quality of a firm’s innovative output. Inventors, especially new hires, determine the domain of innovation more so than their parent firm. The results suggest the domain of human capital expertise is essential for both the level and direction of innovation.
“Matching in Teams and Wages: A Quantitative Framework” w/ Liangjie Wu
This paper treats the firm as a team assembling technology by extending a tractable version of the standard Becker matching model to large teams. We provide a new framework to quantify the interaction between production complementarities and wages.
Works in Progress
“Career Choice of Entrepreneurs and the Rise of ‘Smart’ Firms” w/ Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Marta Prato
We study how entrepreneurs develop “smart” firms through assembling teams of smart inventors. We find an entrepreneur’s IQ, parental and schooling background, and the team’s IQ all inform the firm potential. We embed these facts in an endogenous growth model and find sorting between entrepreneurs and inventors explains a significant amount of firm growth and economic growth.
“The Mechanics of Innovation and Endogenous Growth: Evidence from Historical US Patents” w/ Ufuk Akcigit, William Kerr, Tom Nicholas
We study the long-run decline in novel technologies and rise in new combinations of existing technologies. Novel technologies are underproduced as inventors domain of innovation choice does not internalize the use of an invented technology as an input to combine with in later innovations.
“Need for Speed: The Quality of Innovations and Inventor Allocation” w/ Santiago Caicedo
Inventors are sorting into larger firms over time. This has implications for the nature of innovation as large and small firms pursue different innovation strategies, with large firms pursuing “faster” (e.g., inventors have less time between patents) more incremental innovation and small firms pursuing “slower” (e.g., inventors have more time between patents) more radical innovation. We embed this in an endogenous growth model to study how counterfactual inventor allocations impact economic growth. We find the move to faster innovations has slowed economic growth.