Research Projects

From Wells to Windmills: Resource Redeployment and New Technology Investment in the Energy Sector  (solo, 3rd R&R at the Strategic Management Journal)

This study examines how multi-business firms redeploy resources following an industry shock, with a focus on the direction and heterogeneity of such redeployments. Using the case of oil and gas (O&G) firms diversified into wind power, it documents that firms reduced expenditure in O&G—particularly on complex offshore projects—while increasing investment in wind after the 2014 oil price crash. These investments tended to involve newer, more powerful technologies (turbines) when colocated with existing offshore O&G assets. The study highlights conflicting findings in prior research on redeployment direction, and documents conditions under which firms shifted away from one industry and pursued more demanding projects in another. The findings underscore the role of asset colocation in shaping investment patterns following resource redeployment.

Myopic Expansions on Platforms (with Ahmadreza Mostajabi and Keyvan Vakili, 2nd R&R at Administrative Science Quarterly)

The literature on multisided platforms focuses primarily on their ability to resolve market frictions and facilitate matchmaking. However, the downside of resolving these frictions has largely been overlooked. We argue that extensive resolution of market frictions such as frictionless market entry can cause participants to overlook the heterogeneous nature of different markets and engage in myopic market expansions, leading to customer dissatisfaction, lower performance, and innovation rate. We test our arguments in the context of Apple's App Store. We find that app developers' large-scale market expansion negatively affects their ratings, downloads, financial performance, and innovation rate in the long run, despite a short-term growth in their customer base. We contribute to the literature by highlighting the negative side of frictionless market entry on platforms.

Markets for Trade Secrets (with Rohin Vrajesh and Colleen Cunningham) 

Licensing trade secrets risks losing them. Yet, to profit from invention, firms may engage in such deals, especially as trade secrets are commonly used to protect intellectual property (IP). In this paper, we document and investigate the mechanisms which may facilitate trade secret licenses. Using the roll-out of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act across the US, we investigate how stronger trade secret protection affects the likelihood of trade secret deals compared to patent-only licensing deals. We use data on 2,422 patent licenses with and without trade secrets for a sample of 649 licensing firms. Around 11% of our sample include trade secrets. Following the passage of stronger UTSA protections, complementary trade secret licensing is more likely. We find evidence that knowledge leakage risk matters: stronger legal trade secret protection enables transactions that do not require additional registered IP protection, are not exclusive, and are more spread out geographically. The results broaden our understanding of the frictions, and solutions, involved in trading non-patent IP.

Patent races and product quality (with Rohin Vrajesh and Keyvan Vakili) 

We study the link between intangible resources and their application in the product market. The resource-based view in strategic management posits that rarer and more difficult to imitate resources enable superior performance, but embedding such resources in commercialized products may be difficult due to the leap in technological application they require. We find that more incremental, less novel intangible resources (patents) are more likely to be embedded in products. We also show that an exogenous change in the disclosure environment, shifting incentives from “first to invent” to “first inventor to file” is associated with a reduction in the scope of patents, consistent with the interpretation that firms “rush to the patent office”: following this environmental change, products contain less novel patents, on average. Thus, this paper provides rare evidence on the actual commercial use of patents in products and how patent and environmental characteristics translate into product market innovation. 

Never waste a good crisis (with Divya Saxena and Sendil Ethiraj) 

Why do some firms innovate during industry downturns? While prior literature highlights the role of market exit and resource reallocation in enhancing productivity during recessions—the so-called “cleansing effect”—this paper offers a novel mechanism linking industry shocks, resource reallocation, and firm-level innovation. We argue that downturns free up constrained complementary resources, thereby enabling firms to reorganize and innovate when previously limited by input bottlenecks. We exploit the 2014 oil price crash and examine the U.S. onshore oil-producing firms’ outcomes in Texas between 2010 to 2017. We document a widespread contraction, firm exit, and resource reallocation—specifically land—but also substantial within-firm resource redeployment. We find that productivity gains were concentrated among surviving firms in congested areas, where freed-up land leases allowed for more efficient, technologically advanced horizontal drilling. These effects were not observed in previously less congested regions. Our findings highlight the importance of input complementarity in enabling innovation during downturns. We contribute to strategic management by providing evidence for how industry-level reallocation and firm-level redeployment drive innovation by alleviating structural input bottlenecks that had previously limited firms’ ability to innovate and improve productivity.