Research

Job Market Paper: 

Intellectual Mobility Frictions (with D.Verhoeven)  

Winner Heinz Koning Award (best paper at the 2024 Economics of Innovation and Patenting conference at ZEW)

Abstract: Despite repeated findings that intellectually mobile inventors - those with experience in multiple technological fields - have a comparative advantage in the production of breakthrough inventions, aggregate evidence suggests that the share of intellectually mobile inventors is falling. In this paper, we propose the presence of allocation frictions which increase the cost a firm must pay to allocate inventors to a technological field in which they have not previously invented. We create a simple framework to estimate these frictions at the micro-level and find them to be extremely high in magnitude, and heterogeneous across firms and the technological space. The estimates suggest that it would cost more than 8\% of annual US public R&D to obtain a frictionless allocation scenario, when the frictions are present at their current intensity. 

Inventor Mobility Under Uncertainty (with D.Czarnitzki & T.Doherr)

Research Policy,  Volume 53, Issue 1, January 2024, 104896

Winner - Best paper award at the 2022 KID Summer School

Abstract: Previous work suggests a general uncertainty surrounding the migration process acts as a barrier to outmigration. In this paper, we argue that this barrier is exacerbated when relative economic policy uncertainty is higher in the target country and mitigated when relatively higher in the origin country. We create an inventor career panel to observe inventor migration between 12 European countries between 1997 and 2012. This allows us to test the premise that a higher relative uncertainty in the origin country raises the probability of inventor outmigration. Our results suggest a 1 standard deviation increase in the relative uncertainty of the home country is associated with a near 20% increase in the probability of inventor outmigration. The relationship is highly non-linear, with relative uncertainty values in the top centile leading to an increase of over 70%. The observed effects can be amplified or dampened by inventor specific characteristics, as would be expected given the prior art. 

Specialisation and the Career Outcomes of Inventors (Draft available on request) 

Abstract: Recent years have seen a reorganisation of innovation production to favour groups of collaborators, and increasingly specialised inventors. In this paper, I construct a panel of highly prolific inventors whom I observe frequently throughout their career. I develop a simple setting whereby inventors face a trade-off between acquiring knowledge depth and knowledge breadth. Empirically, I find that, after controlling for selection into specialised careers, knowledge depth is consistently negatively associated with the probability that an inventor contributes to an invention which receives citations in the top quantile. The negative effects largely hold across technological fields and, across the inventor's career cycle. The negative relationship between specialisation and highly-cited inventions is concerning given the disproportionate value of such inventions to society. 

Work in Progress

Patent litigation, firm dynamics and the direction of invention

Allocation problems in science funding (with J.Adda and M.Ottaviani)

Navigating Bureaucracy and Firm Growth: Evidence from Chilean Entrepreneurs (with M. Balmaceda)

Trade shocks and the technological space