We examine the effect of patenting on the survival prospects of 356 internet-related firms that IPO'd at the height of the stock market bubble of the late 1990s. By March 2005, nearly 2/3 of these firms had delisted from the NASDAQ exchange. Although changes in the legal environment in the US in...

The rise of information technology and big data analytics has given rise to "the new economy." But are its economics new? This article constructs a growth model where firms accumulate data, instead of capital. We incorporate three key features of data: 1) Data is a by-product of economic...

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the...

While official measures of business dynamism have seen a long-term decline, early-stage venture financing of new companies has reached levels not observed since the late 1990s, resulting in a sharp debate about the state of American entrepreneurship. Building on Guzman and Stern (2015a; 2015b), this...

This article investigates how a firm's financial strength affects its dynamic decision to invest in R&D. We estimate a dynamic model of R&D choice using data for German firms in high-tech manufacturing industries. The model incorporates a measure of the firm's financial strength, derived from...

An employee's annual earnings fall by 10% the year her firm files for bankruptcy and fall by a cumulative present value of 67% over seven years. This effect is more pronounced in thin labor markets and among small firms that are ultimately liquidated. Compensating wage differentials for this...

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This has forced researchers to adopt a variety of indirect approaches. This paper...

In this paper, we investigate how personal bankruptcy law affects small firms' access to credit. When a firm is unincorporated, its debts are personal liabilities of the firm's owner, so that lending to the firm is legally equivalent to lending to its owner. If the firm fails, the owner has an...

Competition in many important industries centers on investment in intellectual property. Firms engage in dynamic, Schumpeterian competition for the market, through sequential winner-take-all races to produce drastic innovations, rather than through static price/output competition in the market....