September 3, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm ET
September 3, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm ET
Embedded Files
Christopher Esposito (UCLA) - will present "A stress test of he U.S. Knowledge Supply Chain". Here is a link to the full working paper. Here is a link to the presentation video.
Abstract: Like physical products, new technologies are created by combining inputs from across the world. This paper identifies the global supply chain of scientific knowledge used by U.S. inventors and tests its resilience to international shocks. Using simulations that remove countries from the supply chain and allow the network to reconfigure, I show that the supply of science relied on by U.S. inventors is resilient to shocks affecting individual countries, but that shocks that affect multiple countries can lead the supply chain to collapse. Network collapse not only impedes the ability for inventors in the U.S. to access foreign science, but also impacts their ability to capitalize on domestic investments in basic research: preliminary estimates suggest that excluding international science from the U.S. economy would decrease the conversion of NSF-funded science into patented technologies by 47% and would slow the speed of conversion by 25%. Furthermore, the exposure of U.S. invention to international disruptions is distributed unevenly across countries and legislative entities: while losing access to Canadian science would reduce the conversion rate of NSF-funded science to patents by 3% and the slow the process by 1%, losing access to science from the European Union would reduce the rate by 25% and slow the process by 15%.
September 17, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
September 17, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Carmelo Cennamo (Copenhagen Business School) - will present "User attention and targeted advertising in social media platforms: When does attention brokerage benefit users?"
Abstract: Social media platforms, as attention brokers, face a fundamental tension between the users they serve and the advertisers they depend on. We develop a formal model to investigate how a platform’s ability to broker user attention impacts pricing, advertising strategies, and the welfare of all participants. Our findings reveal that the welfare implications of attention brokerage are critically contingent on the platform’s model. On platforms offering high standalone benefits, such as Facebook, we find a fundamental misalignment of interests. While platform and advertiser profits grow with enhanced attention-brokering, user welfare follows an inverted-U shape, declining as users are exposed to a greater volume of lower-quality and irrelevant ads. This suggests a potential for user over-exploitation. In contrast, on platforms with negligible standalone benefits, like Pinterest, market forces align the incentives of all parties. Here, the welfare of users, advertisers, and the platform all increase monotonically with the platform’s brokering ability. This research offers a novel explanation for the persistence of irrelevant ads, rooting it in this platform-mediated incentive misalignment. Furthermore, we derive clear policy implications, showing that the optimal level of attention-brokering a regulator would choose depends on the specific welfare standard being maximized. Our results demonstrate that regulatory approaches must be nuanced, as interventions appropriate for platforms with high standalone benefits may be counterproductive for others.
October 1, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
October 1, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Astrid Ulv Thomsen (Copenhagen Business School) - will present "From the Ivory Tower to Capitol Hill: Which Academics Get a Voice in Congress?" (with Yotem Sofer)
Abstract: Examining economic academics’ engagement with public policymakers, this paper investigates the impact of technological changes on the composition of expert witnesses, in the context of testimony before the U.S. Congress. Utilizing a COVID-19 related policy change in Congress we show that technological tools reducing the opportunity costs for certain demographic groups changed the com-position of witnesses significantly. We document that female economists have historically been un-derrepresented in this form of academic engagement but have seen an upward trend as their represen-tation in the broader field increased. After the implementation of online hearings, women were sig-nificantly more likely to give testimony, compared to men. The results also show that while overall, the geography and institutional status of expert witnesses did not change, an increase in the probabil-ity of female economists from these groups is documented. Our results imply that digital tools pro-moting flexibility can alleviate disparities in high-impact dissemination by academics, which in turn can increase policymakers’ access to high-quality researchers with a diverse pool of ideas, perspec-tives, and knowledge.
October 8, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
October 8, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Emily Cox Pahnke (University of Washington) - will present ""Strategic Positioning and Accelerating Regulatory Clearance for New Ventures"
Abstract: How do new ventures strategically position their products to accelerate regulatory clearance? We investigate this question in the medical device industry, where regulatory clearance is a prerequisite for market entry. We examine 239 new firms' 510(k) clearances between 2001-2019. Our mixed-methods approach combines quantitative analysis of firms' claims of similarity with extensive field research. We find that strategic positioning significantly impacts time to clearance, and that effective strategies evolve over time. For first products, firms accelerate clearance by citing fewer references while strategically positioning relative to same-category products, and to category exemplars; for second products, firms accelerate clearance by referencing their own products. These findings extend positioning theory beyond market-based audiences into regulatory contexts and reveal how a firm’s optimal strategic positioning evolves over time.
October 23, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
October 23, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Matt Marx (Cornell University) - will present "Connecting Fundamental Science to Commercial Innovation: A Public Dataset of Patent-Paper Pairs"
Abstract: We provide a dataset of Patent-Paper Pairs (PPPs) across all fields of science, linking articles from the Microsoft Academic Graph to patents granted by the USPTO. We train a random forest based on a combination of hand-checked PPPs and those containing extensive “self-plagiarism”, incorporating variables such as temporal distance, title/abstract similarity, inventor/author overlap, similarity of assignee and institution(s), overlap of backward citations, and being supported by the same grant. We employ this dataset to revisit the perennial question of whether the patent system fulfills its original objective to “promote the progress of science” by comparing citations to PPPs vs potential PPPs where the patent was not granted, instrumenting via examiner leniency.
November 5, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
November 5, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Nikhil Kalathil (Carnegie Mellon University) - will present “The Realized Returns from Varieties of Agglomeration for New Manufacturing Firms” (with Lauren Lanahan)
Abstract: We estimate the returns from varieties of agglomeration for new manufacturing firms. Within each industry, we leverage marginal variation across similarly highly agglomerated counties that the industry operates in, highlighting differences in rates of horizontal and vertical agglomeration. The former identifies geographies with greater co-location of own-industry or peer establishments, and the latter identifies geographies with greater co-location of industry suppliers. Drawing from the population of US manufacturing firms founded between 2012 – 2015 and tracing their performance activity over their first five years of operations, we report differential results for firms operating in horizontally agglomerated counties relative to firms operating in vertically agglomerated counties. We document persistent trends that the appropriability from horizontal agglomeration increases sales by approximately 14 percent for new manufacturing firms. This trend is amplified for ventures located proximate to large, headquartered anchor firms. We report differential performance returns from horizontal agglomeration in manufacturing industries with greater upstream activity, whereas we document contrasting performance benefits for vertical agglomeration for industries operating at later stages of production. Lastly, new manufacturing firms positioned in an outlying manner to the dominant form of their industry’s agglomeration report disproportionately greater performance benefits. Our results support the theory that regional and industrial characteristics mediate the exact type of market failures (i.e., transaction costs, information asymmetries, and frictions in network formation) that influence the appropriability of agglomeration assets. This study offers several contributions by providing a framework to understand variation in agglomeration, disentangling the strategic returns from various features of agglomeration, and quantifying the returns from agglomeration on firm performance.
November 19, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
November 19, 2025: 11:00 am - 12:15 pm ET
Jing Deng (Arizona State University) - will present “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Why High-Tech Firms Leave Agglomerations” (with Maryann Feldman and Janet Bercovitz)
Abstract: Agglomeration economies confer well-documented advantages to high-tech firms, raising important questions about why some firms relocate to less concentrated regions. Using longitudinal microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the drivers of firm exit from agglomerations, focusing on three hypothesized push factors: knowledge leakage, competition for skilled labor, and interstate tax differentials. Our analysis reveals that labor market pressures and tax burdens are the most salient drivers of relocation, while effects vary systematically by firm age. Established firms tend to relocate to contain operational costs, whereas younger firms are more likely to exit agglomerations due to challenges in attracting and retaining skilled talent. These findings highlight heightened competition for talent as an overlooked push factor and challenge the conventional assumption that agglomeration effects are uniformly beneficial, demonstrating that their impact is contingent on firm characteristics and organizational maturity. We conceptualize relocation as a strategic response to life-cycle dynamics and labor market constraints, contributing to research on firm strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic geography by highlighting the spatial interdependencies that shape regional development and firm growth trajectories.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse