Research


Working Papers

Inventor mobility may transfer knowledge across firms, but observed innovation gains at receiving firms could equally reflect the sorting of productive workers into productive firms. Separating these two channels has been empirically difficult because the most innovative firms attract the most talented workers and growing firms hire most when scaling their innovation. I provide individual-level causal evidence that inventor mobility raises incumbent innovation. The design exploits 238 repeated mass layoffs in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015 as exogenous shocks to local high-skill labor supply. The empirical specification is a firm-level intent-to-treat regression. USPTO patent records provide the main panel of inventor activity over time, augmented with LinkedIn employment histories to identify worker mobility. A direct sorting diagnostic shows that adding firm fixed effects on top of inventor fixed effects shifts the post-displacement coefficient by less than 4%, suggesting that time-invariant firm sorting does not materially bias the estimates. Incumbents at receiving firms increase patenting by 8%, forward citations by 18%, and novelty by 5%, with nearly identical IV estimates. The effect operates through both direct collaboration and broader within-firm transmission, with the largest gains where incumbents' prior expertise was most distant from that of the displaced inventor, consistent with knowledge complementarity. The results document embodied knowledge diffusion within firms and a positive externality of involuntary labor reallocation that firm-level analyses cannot detect.



Work in Progress