Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the...

We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that...

We draw upon newly merged administrative data sets to study the relationship between payments from medical technology firms to physicians and medical device procurement by hospitals. These payments (and the interactions that accompany them) may facilitate the transfer of valuable information to...

When firms span related product categories, spillovers across categories become central to firm strategy and industrial policy, due to their potential to foreclose competition and affect innovation incentives. We exploit major new product innovations in one medical device category, and detailed...

In the analysis of disability, when we don't control for the initial level of disability, we find that conditions with higher rates of lab and outpatient innovation had greater declines in the probability of missing work during 1996-2003. This suggests that the use of new laboratory procedures...

Using a detailed dataset of hospitals' purchase orders, we find that information on purchasing by peer hospitals leads to reductions in the prices hospitals negotiate for supplies. Identification is based on staggered access to information across hospitals over time. Within coronary stents,...

We exploit Medicare national coverage reimbursement approvals of medical devices as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate how private and publicly traded firm financing decisions and product introductions respond to exogenous changes in investment opportunities. We find that publicly traded...

We examine the relationship between product liability litigation and innovation by systematically combining data on product liability lawsuits with data on new product introductions in a panel dataset of leading medical device firms. We first document a decline in the propensity to introduce new...

We use new theory and data to study how firms endogenously form production networks across regions and countries. Supplier and buyer relationships form depending on firms' productivity and geographic location. We characterize the normative and positive properties of the spatial distribution of...

After the new plant opening, incumbent plants in winning counties experience a sharp relative increase in TFP. Five years after the opening, TFP of incumbent plants in winning counties is 12% higher than TFP of incumbent plants in losing counties. Consistent with some theories of agglomeration,...