We study the effect of earnings manipulation on incentives within the corporate hierarchy. When top management manipulates earnings, it must prevent information leakage from corporate insiders to the outside world. If an insider (e.g. a division manager) gains evidence about earnings...

We study the effect of earnings manipulation on incentives within the corporate hierarchy. When top management manipulates earnings, it must prevent information leakage from corporate insiders to the outside world. If an insider (e.g. a division manager) gains evidence about earnings...

Can we design statistical models to predict corporate earnings which either perform as well as, or even better than analysts? If we can, then we might consider automating the process, and notably apply it to small and international firms which typically have either sparse or no analyst coverage....

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

This paper examines the sources of firm product and process innovation in Norway. It uses a purpose-built survey of 1604 firms in the five largest Norwegian city-regions to test, by means of a logit regression analysis, Jensen et al.’s (2007) contention that firm innovation is both the result...

This paper identifies the leading country-industry combinations that define the world technology frontier in manufacturing. Using a unique industry dataset compiled from EU KLEMS and PATSTAT, it explores which countries and industries reveal the most efficient innovation processes. We combine a...

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas -- the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) -- at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several...

This paper uses high- and low-impact citation indicators for the evaluation of the citation performance of research units at different aggregate levels. To solve the problem of the assignment of individual articles to multiple sub-fields, it follows a multiplicative strategy according to which...

We analyze incentives to develop entrepreneurial ideas for venture capitalists (VCs) and incumbent firms. If VCs are sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level...