Information accessibility and knowledge creation: the impact of Google’s withdrawal from China on scientific research (with Katrin Hussinger)
Do China’s special economic zones increase incentives to invest in R&D? (with Katrin Hussinger)
The Professional Costs of Speech Sanctioning Events: Evidence from Academia (with Kris Gulati) - Under review (Management Science)
Winner, Steven Klepper Award for Best Young Scholar Paper, DRUID (2024)
ABSTRACT: Public controversies over employee speech where individuals face backlash for expressing views deemed controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms - sometimes colloquially referred to as “cancel culture” - have become increasingly prevalent. Yet, systematic evidence of their professional consequences remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of U.S.-based academics involved in such events, combined with bibliometric data, we employ a series of difference-in-differences designs to measure the effects on individuals’ productivity and recognition. We find that, following these events, affected scholars experience a decline in the recognition of their prior body of work, with citations declining by 4.8%, reflecting a form of peer-to-peer distancing. Furthermore, affected scholars experience a decline in their productivity, publishing 20% fewer papers compared to a comparable set of scholars. These citation declines are disproportionately driven by scholars who are closely connected to the affected individual, consistent with a mechanism of professional distancing. Our findings highlight the professional and career costs associated with speech sanctioning events.
Best Paper Finalists, Academy of Management – TIM division 2025
ABSTRACT: Why do firms contribute to open scientific knowledge despite the risks of knowledge spillovers and weakened appropriability? Prior research explains corporate open science primarily through strategic considerations, including talent attraction, signaling, and access to external knowledge. This study introduces a complementary perspective by examining how executives’ culturally imprinted value orientations shape firms’ participation in the scientific commons. Drawing on upper echelons and imprinting theories, I argue that early-life exposure to Confucian cultural environments influences how CEOs interpret the trade-offs inherent in scientific publication. Confucian ideology emphasizes collective welfare and social contribution, potentially increasing leaders’ willingness to tolerate appropriability risks associated with open science. Using a dataset of Chinese publicly listed firms linked to nearly 389,000 scientific publications between 2007 and 2021, I find that firms led by CEOs exposed to Confucian cultural environments produce significantly more scientific publications. This relationship is reinforced when other top leaders share similar cultural backgrounds and is strongest in institutional contexts where Confucian norms are less prevalent, consistent with an imprint–environment contrast effect. These findings contribute to research on corporate open science by introducing culturally imprinted executive values as a source of heterogeneity in firms’ engagement with the public knowledge system and by advancing understanding of how informal institutions, i.e., unwritten, socially shared norms, shape the governance of innovation.
ABSTRACT: Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) and institutional theory, we examine how institutional quality influences the market valuation of firms’ innovative assets. While prior work assumes that valuable, rare, and inimitable resources, such as R&D investments and patents, naturally generate competitive advantage, we argue that this advantage depends on the level of local institutional development. Using data on Chinese listed firms, we show that in weak institutional environments, where investor protection and information disclosure are limited, the stock market systematically undervalues innovative assets, constraining firms’ ability to convert innovative assets into sustainable competitive advantage. We further identify two boundary conditions for the proposed RBV-institutional logic: insider ownership and corporate share repurchase. Both function as credible managerial actions that facilitate the market valuation of R&D and patents in weak institutional contexts. Our findings contribute to the RBV by highlighting the role of the local institutional environment in generating a competitive advantage from innovative assets.
ABSTRACT: International research networks enable firms to internationalize by accessing geographically distributed knowledge, leveraging complementary capabilities across borders, and thus strengthening innovation and competitive advantage in global markets. This study examines how family firms from the Global South and Global North engage in such networks by comparing international research collaborations (IRCs) of Chinese and U.S. family firms. We argue that Chinese family firms rely more heavily on IRCs to signal legitimacy and status in global innovation networks; consequently, they engage more in IRCs, especially with partners from the Global North, than comparable U.S. family firms do with Global South partners. We further propose that CEO identity conditions how these incentives translate into realized IRCs. A newly constructed panel dataset of Chinese and U.S. family firms, counting 2,150 firm-year observations, confirms that Chinese family firms allocate a higher proportion of collaborations abroad and display a stronger “upward” bias toward Global North partners than U.S. family firms toward Global South ones; in addition, the presence of a family CEO dampens Chinese family firms’ IRC intensity but amplifies it for U.S. ones. These findings highlight how ownership, governance, and home-country context jointly shape family firms’ scientific internationalization of innovation processes and knowledge exchanges.
Tracking Scientific Decoupling in the Era of New Techno-Nationalism: Shifts in International Collaborations on Semiconductor Research (with Tartari V.)
ABSTRACT: International scientific collaboration is central to technological progress, yet it is increasingly shaped by geopolitical tensions and rising techno-nationalist policies. Despite growing attention, systematic evidence on how such policies affect international research collaboration and scientific outcomes remains limited. This paper examines how rising U.S.–China tensions have reshaped international research collaboration in semiconductors, a strategically critical and highly globalized technology. Using bibliometric data linked to patent citations, we track collaboration patterns, publication output, research quality, and applied relevance of semiconductor science before and after the escalation of U.S. techno-nationalist policies in 2019. We compare U.S.–China collaborations with other international partnerships and exploit heterogeneity in firms’ pre-existing reliance on Chinese collaborators. We find that U.S.–China research collaborations decline sharply after 2019 and that U.S. firms more exposed to the loss of Chinese partners experience persistent reductions in high-impact and application-relevant research, despite stable publication volumes. At the same time, Chinese institutions expand both the quantity and quality of semiconductor research. These findings suggest that techno-nationalist policies may have unintended consequences for domestic innovation capacity.
The Ask Gap: Gender Differences in Requested Grant Funding (with Thomsen, A, Gulati, K., Kongsted, H. C. & Tartari, V.)
ABSTRACT: Scientific discovery depends not only on what ideas are funded, but on how researchers translate ideas into resource requests that shape teams, training, and future knowledge production. Using a novel dataset covering the full universe of funded and unfunded grant applications to two major philanthropic science funders in Europe between 2011 and 2022, linked to peer-review scores and investigators’ prior research records, we examine whether gender differences arise in the funding process. We document that female principal investigators receive 6.4–7.4% less funding per application than male investigators. This gap is mostly explained by differences at the proposal stage: women request 5-5.4% less funding, conditional on proposal quality and researcher characteristics. This is despite there being no incentives to request smaller grants, a claim we confirm empirically. Using granular budget data, we show that this gap manifests itself in team size formation, with female investigators systematically proposing smaller PhD student teams. We find no significant differences across other budget categories. Exploiting heterogeneity across sub-groups to shed light on underlying mechanisms, we show that the gender gap in funding requests is concentrated among: early-career researchers, lower prior publications, lower prior average research impact factor, and converges with experience through repeated applications, consistent with learning and information frictions. These findings shift attention from evaluators to applicants, highlighting how differences in resource construction - rather than evaluation bias - can generate durable disparities in scientific capacity. Extrapolating to the U.S. context suggests that women may be systematically requesting on the order of $0.75 billion less annually from major public funders, with implications for training capacity, cumulative knowledge production, and the organization of scientific labor.
ABSTRACT: This study addresses the question how firms respond to foreign demand shocks. Many countries engage in foreign trade agreements to improve access to foreign demand, but often firms’ responses are much smaller than anticipated by policy makers. We seek to provide a novel analysis investigating the mechanisms that drive heterogeneous responses to demand shocks by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment. We study Mexican firms’ responses to exogenous variation in U.S. demand that is generated by antidumping (AD) duties, imposed by the U.S. on Chinese exports. When the U.S. introduces AD duties on Chinese products, Chinese prices increase and motivate U.S. consumers to substitute Chinese products with other sources of supply. This expands in turn demand for other exporters, especially for Mexican ones given that U.S. is their main export market and Chinese firms are close competitors. For the purpose of our identification strategy, these AD disputes are exogenous to Mexican firms and also spread across most manufacturing sectors, which increases external validity of our results. Our results confirm a positive effect of the U.S. demand shock on Mexican firms’ U.S. exports for treated products during the treatment period. The magnitude of Mexican firms’ export surges is heterogeneous and dependent on firm-specific export characteristics: a higher U.S. export activity favoured whereas a higher global export activity diminished the magnitude of the firm’s export surge as respond to the shock. Similarly, a higher U.S. product diversity supported whereas a higher export diversification in many different destinations hampered the magnitude of firms’ export responses to the shock. Global export experience does hence not facilitate per se firms’ responses to an improvement in foreign market access. Instead, a deep country-specific trade integration and market knowledge appear relevant for the firms’ ability to respond to foreign demand shocks. The present study examines the export response of Mexican firms to emerging foreign demand opportunities by taking advantage of exogenous variation in U.S. demand. The analysis emphasises the investigation of specific characteristics that drive heterogeneity in firms’ gains from such demand opportunities.