Working Papers

“Brand Reallocation, Concentration, and Growth” w/ Liangjie Wu, (SSRN Link)

This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of brand reallocation by building a new dataset on the universe of brand ownership across firms. Employing new facts from the data, we develop and quantify a model linking brand creation and reallocation across firms to market concentration and economic growth. Brand reallocation increases efficiency even though it increases concentration; subsidies to entry are a better policy than taxing brand reallocation to increase growth and reduce concentration.

“Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth” w/ Ufuk Akcigit and Marta Prato. NBER Working Paper #27862 (Accepted, Review of Economic Studies).

Talent is the most essential ingredient in innovation. This paper explores the links between talent, education, and innovation, enabling a micro-founded quantitative analysis on the interaction of education and innovation policies.

“Need for Speed: Quality of Innovations and the Allocation of Inventors” w/ Santiago Caicedo

We study the speed-quality tradeoff in innovation, building an endogenous growth framework on empirical evidence of the transition to faster patenting. We exploit empirical evidence on the allocation of inventors across firms, firms heterogeneous decisions, and experimental variation on the speed-quality tradeoff to calibrate the model. We find that the transition to faster patenting has slowed growth and continuing this transition can significantly hamper long-run growth.

“Idea Production and Team Structure”

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

(presented at NBER Summer Institute Inequality and Macro, 2021 and SED Firm Dynamics, 2022)

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.