Research

Local Innovation Spillovers of IPOs [Job Market Paper]

I study how initial public offerings (IPOs) affect innovative activity in the local areas around IPO firms. To isolate causal effects, I compare counties with completed IPOs to those with withdrawn filings and instrument for IPO completion using NASDAQ returns during the book-building period. I find that local innovation increases significantly after a firm goes public in a county: IPO completion raises local patenting by roughly 9% in OLS and nearly 50% in the IV specification. Spillover effects are stronger for firms operating in technologies similar to the IPO firms, in counties where the IPO firms account for a larger share of the local economy, and within smaller geographic areas. Local innovation in IPO counties increases mainly through existing firms becoming more innovative and attracting new inventors to the area.   

Going Public and the Boundaries of the Firm

I study the effects of initial public offerings (IPOs) on firm boundaries. Since the decision to go public is endogenous, I compare firms that successfully complete their IPO filings and go public with those that withdraw their filings and remain private. To address the additional bias introduced by this strategy, I use NASDAQ returns during the book-building period as an instrument for IPO completion. I find that there is a significant degree of restructuring within firms after an IPO. Firms that successfully complete their IPO filings are more likely to engage in divestitures after going public. Moreover, these firms are also more active in acquisitions and form significantly more strategic alliances with other firms. These results highlight that firms tend to shift certain business activities outside their boundaries after transitioning to public ownership.

Work In Progress

Decomposing Firm Responses to Carbon Pricing Using Product Data, joint with Gustav Martinsson, Per Strömberg, Christian Thomann, and Jiayu Zhang

We examine how manufacturing firms adjust to carbon taxation using Swedish administrative microdata underlying producer price indices, linked to firm-level CO2 emissions. We decompose firms’ responses into price pass-through, product mix adjustments, and “true” reductions in emission intensities. We find that carbon taxes reduce emissions relative to sales, but a meaningful share of this decline reflects higher output prices rather than real abatement. After accounting for pricing, firms lower emissions per unit produced, partly by shifting toward less carbon-intensive products. Mechanisms differ sharply across firms: low-emitting firms achieve large reductions by dropping high-emission non-core products, whereas high-emitting firms rely more on a combination of pricing and technological improvements. Our results refine estimates of emission-to-carbon-price elasticities and highlight that failing to account for pricing responses overstates real abatement. The findings inform the design of carbon pricing policies that induce genuine reductions in emissions.

Corporate Innovation: Text-Based Evidence from Sweden

The existing literature almost exclusively relies on patents or R&D intensity to measure corporate innovation. I construct a novel text-based measure of innovation by analyzing annual reports of Swedish public companies between 1994 and 2018. I estimate a topics model on the corpus of annual reports using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm. Out of the estimated topics, the one closest to a standard textbook on innovation is selected as the innovation topic. Then, the loading on the innovation topic in each document is used as a text-based measure of innovation. The text-based measure is expected to capture non-patentable innovations, such as improvements in organizational structure or management practices, as well as traditional patenting outcomes. I show that it is strongly associated with patent counts and (to a lesser extent) with R&D intensity. Moreover, it is highly informative in predicting the future operating performance of patent-producing firms as well as that of firms that do not engage in patenting activity. 

Pre-PhD Working Papers