Representation of women and minorities in a "selectorate"--the group that chooses an organization's leaders--is a key mechanism for promoting diversity. We show that representation, on its own, is not sufficient for selecting gender diversity: a supportive organizational culture is also...

We study a dynamic model of the decision to continue or abandon a research project. Researchers improve their ideas over time and also learn whether those ideas will be adopted by the scientific community. Projects are abandoned as researchers grow more pessimistic about their chance of success....

In a model of industry standard setting with private information about firms' intellectual property, we analyze (a) firms' incentives to contribute to the development and improvement of a standard, and (b) firms' decision to disclose the existence of relevant intellectual property to other...

Are CEOs' attitudes and beliefs linked to their fims' innovative performance? This paper uses Malmendier and Tate's measure of overconfidence, based on CEO stock-option exercise, to study the relationship between a CEO's "revealed beliefs" about future performance and standard measures of...

This paper studies the intellectual property strategy of firms that participate in the formal standards process. Specifically, we examine litigation rates in a sample of patents disclosed to thirteen voluntary Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs). We find that SSO patents have a relatively high...

We exploit a change in eligibility rules for the Canadian Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) tax credit to gain insight on how tax credits impact small-firm R&D expenditures. After a 2004 program change, privately owned firms that became eligible for a 35 percent tax credit...

It is more than 25 years since the authors of the Yale and Carnegie surveys studied how firms seek to protect the rents from innovation. In this paper, we revisit that question using a nationally representative sample of firms over the period 2008-2015, with the goal of updating and extending a...

Abstract U.S. firms have reduced their investment in scientific research ("R") compared to product development ("D"), raising questions about the returns to each type of investment, and about the reasons for this shift. We use Census data that disaggregates "R" from "D" to study how US firms...

African- American motorist in the United States are much more likely than white motorists to have their car searched by police checking for illegal drugs and other contraband. The courts are faced with the task of deciding on the basis of traffic-search data whether police behavior reflects a...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...