Collusion is widely condemned for its negative effects on consumer welfare and market efficiency. In this paper, I show that collusion may also in some cases facilitate the creation of unexpected new sources of value. I bring this possibility into focus through the lens of a historical episode...

CEO activism refers to corporate leaders speaking out on social and environmental policy issues not directly related to their company's core business. Distinct from nonmarket strategy and traditional corporate social responsibility, the recent wave of CEO activism focuses on social issues...

The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a field experiment with a sample...

We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of US companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high purpose firms come in two forms:...

This paper presents a History Friendly Model which addresses the issue of the bifurcation in technological styles" between US and Britain during the nineteenth century. The model aims at gaining a better understanding of the micro-dynamics that gave rise to different patterns of innovation in...

A new model of economic growth introduces the knowledge filter between new knowledge and economically useful knowledge. It identifies both new ventures and incumbent firms as the mechanisms that penetrate the knowledge filter. Recent empirical work has shown that new firms are more proficient at...

We develop a model in which stronger protection of intellectual property rights has an inverted U-shaped effect on innovation. Intellectual property rights protection allows the incumbent firms to capture part of the rents of commercial exploration that would otherwise accrue to the...

In this study, we quantify the role of foreign-born founders in high-tech entrepreneurship in a nationally representative sample of rapidly growing high-impact companies. This class of companies drives job creation and aggregate growth in the U.S. We find that, while most previous studies have...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external...

This paper investigates the causes of the shortfall in private R&D expenditure of the EU compared to the US. It shows that differences in the structure of the two economies play only a minor role in explaining the R&D gap. Instead, the European R&D shortfall is mainly caused by a negative...