Research

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)

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 – often labeled as “cancel culture” – are increasingly common. Yet, systematic evidence of their professional repercussions remains limited. Using a novel dataset of U.S.-based academics ‘cancelled’ for their speech, we employ a series of difference-in-differences designs to estimate the effects on career outcomes. We find that, following a controversy, affected scholars experience a decline in their productivity, publishing 18% fewer new papers than the counterfactual and a 4% decline in citations to their prior work, reflecting a form of peer-to-peer sanctioning. This decline is disproportionately driven by scholars who are closely connected to the affected individuals, consistent with a pattern of professional distancing. These findings highlight the professional costs of public speech controversies and contribute to the literatures on workplace and employee activism as well as the career consequences of speech-related scandals.

Online Appendix available here.

ABSTRACT: A growing literature suggests that CEOs’ pre-career experiences shape their values and beliefs, which in turn influence firms’ strategic choices. Building on these insights, I shift the focus from individual experiences to the broader cultural environments in which CEOs are embedded during childhood—the period of highest developmental susceptibility— and I argue that the cultural characteristics of these environments also, and perhaps most importantly, leave lasting imprints on CEOs’ value systems, which are later reflected in corporate strategies. To test this, I examine how early-life exposure to a pro-social, Confucian ideological environment influences a firm's adoption of an open science strategy. In contexts where Confucian values emphasize collective welfare, CEOs are more likely to view the public disclosure of their firm’s research—an act that increases the stock of publicly available knowledge and benefits society—as a means of fulfilling their personal, pro-social, culturally-instilled, Confucian goals. Using data on Chinese publicly listed firms, I find that CEOs born near Confucian centers are more likely to engage in open science, highlighting the long-term influence of place-based imprinting on strategic corporate behavior. Importantly, the imprinting effect emerges only when at least one board member shares a similar early-life Confucian exposure, and when the firm is located outside a city with a Confucian center. This latter finding challenges the conventional “imprint–environment fit” perspective and introduces the notion of “imprint–environment contrast”, wherein the absence of cultural reinforcement in the present context strengthens the behavioral salience of early-life imprints.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the relation between a weak institutional environment and the market value of research and development (R&D). Drawing on the resource-based view, we argue that a positive market value of R&D is crucial for the firms' credibility as innovators and for facilitating future R&D financing, which is pivotal in attaining a sustainable competitive advantage, but can be hindered by institutional uncertainty. We find a negative relation between weak institutional environments and the market value of R&D. Despite their well-documented signalling power for promising R&D of firms in developed institutional contexts, we find that patents do not exhibit the same signalling capacity in weak institutional contexts. Further analysis shows that, in weak institutional environments, means with stronger signalling value such as increases in insider ownership and corporate share repurchase need to be employed to enhance the market value of R&D.

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.