Research
Working Papers
Abstract Using a measure of technology novelty, this paper identifies periods with and without technology breakthroughs from the 1980s to the 2020s in the US. It is found that market concentration decreases at the advent of revolutionary technologies. We establish a theory addressing inventors' decisions to establish new firms or join incumbents of specific sizes, yielding two key predictions: (1) A higher share of inventors opt for new firms during periods of heightened technology novelty. (2). There is positive assortative matching between idea quality and firm size if inventors join incumbents. Both predictions align with empirical findings and collectively contribute to a reduction in market concentration when groundbreaking technologies occur. Quantitative analysis shows the channel proposed explains 89% of the correlation between technology novelty waves and market concentration.
Abstract This paper builds a macroeconomic framework which explicitly models the inventors and firms as two separate groups of agents and studies the option of selling innovations affects the mapping between them in an endogenous contracting setting. The model characterizing firm-inventor contracts, firm-innovation synergy and asymmetric information between firms. The model implies that inventors whose outcomes are effort-sensitive choose small firms. In a counterfactual scenario where firms cannot sell innovations, inventors move to larger firms. Quantitatively, the share of innovations in firms with more than 100,000 employees increases by 10 pp, and growth drops by 0.17 pp.
Abstract This paper studies the belief bias in the workplace. I build a structural model where workers can learn from coworkers. They choose where to work based on both wage and perceived learning opportunities. I estimate the model using German administrative data which contain information on workforce composition and workers' characteristics. I propose a methodology to separately estimate the perceived and the correct learning functions, building on the observation that learning is priced by a competitive market based on belief. The estimation results show that workers overestimate how much they can learn from coworkers by eight times. It implies that better knowledgeable workers are overpaid while the rest are underpaid, which increases the within-team inequality.