U.S. Innovation and Chinese Competition for Innovation Production

In this paper, we examine how competitive shocks from China impact U.S. innovation through two distinct margins: the markets for innovation and existing products. 

Increasingly there has been a focus on the impact of China's meteoric rise as an economic power and its impact on the innovation spending by established…

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Education and Innovation:  The Long Shadow of the Cultural Revolution

How important is the education of CEOs to firm level innovation?  In this paper, we examine the human capital cost of an external loss of education on subsequent innovation by firms and ask if it impacted firms more than 30 years later.  We examine the ensuing innovation of Chinese firms…

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Trademarks in Entrepreneurial Finance

Trademarks are an important determinant of the economic value created by firms. A trademark is a word, symbol, or other signifier used to distinguish a good or service produced by one firm from the goods or services of other firms. Firms use trademarks to differentiate their products from those of…

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Persistent Blessings of Luck: Theory and an Application to Venture Capital

Financial economists have long debated whether or not investment managers differ in the skills they have. While studies of individual stocks, mutual funds, and other fund classes generally find that investors do not consistently outperform passive benchmarks after-fee and out-performance is not persistent, an important exception is the private equity…

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Selling Innovation in Bankruptcy

Innovation is crucial for the modern economy. Financing innovation is an important but challenging task for innovative firms as innovation is associated with high degree of uncertainty. In addition, the high-risk nature of innovation makes failure highly likely and thus the bankruptcy process particularly relevant to firms’ financing policy. Ideally,…

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Does Economic Insecurity Affect Employee Innovation?

How does employee productivity respond to large shocks to household wealth? Over the past several decades, the annual proportion of households in the U.S. experiencing a severe economic loss has been steadily increasing, peaking with the recent financial crisis. The impact of household wealth shocks on consumption, savings, and retirement…

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The Life Cycle of Corporate Venture Capital

Recent decades have witnessed non-financial firms’ forays into venture capital by creating Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) divisions. That is, these firms create internal CVC divisions to make systematic minority equity investments in innovative startups. As an illustration, consider GM Ventures, the CVC unit initiated by General Motors in 2010. On…

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