We develop measures of labor-saving and labor-augmenting technology exposure using textual analysis of patents and job tasks. Using US administrative data, we show that both measures negatively predict earnings growth of individual incumbent workers. While labor-saving technologies predict...

This paper examines technology sophistication in establishments. To comprehensively measure technology sophistication, we create a grid that covers key business functions and the technologies used to conduct them. Analyzing data from over 21,000 establishments in 15 countries, we find that the...

An influential explanation for global productivity differences is that frontier technologies are adapted to the high-income countries that develop them and "inappropriate" elsewhere. We study this hypothesis in agriculture using data on novel plant varieties, patents, output, and the global...

We develop and estimate a new model of endogenous growth in bank efficiency and firm productivity in which banks adopt technology embedded in capital goods produced by entrepreneurs, and agents choose whether to become workers or capital-good-producing entrepreneurs. In this framework, bank...

We study the demand for government participation in China's venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and...

We study the global innovation and diffusion of ideas by introducing trade into the model in Eaton and Kortum (1999) (EK). This extension allows us to use international trade flows and country-level factor costs to estimate both the intensity of innovation within countries over time and...

How are inventors allocated in the US economy and does that allocation affect innovative capacity? To answer these questions, we first build a model of creative destruction where an inventor with a new idea has the possibility to work for an entrant or incumbent firm. If the inventor works for...

Innovation is a key driver of long run economic growth. Studying innovation requires a clear view of the characteristics and behavior of the individuals that create new ideas. A general lack of rich, large-scale data has constrained such analyses. We address this by introducing a new dataset...

Because corporate limited liability protects founder's personal assets, creditors often require founders of new, small and risky firms to contract around limited liability by pledging their personal assets as collateral for loans to their firms. This makes personal bankruptcy law (PBL) relevant...

This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. We use a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality...