Large incumbent firms routinely acquire startups. This may stimulate aggregate growth, as acquisitions provide an incentive for startup creation and could transfer ideas to more efficient users. However, large firms do not always implement the ideas of their acquisition targets. Moreover,...

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper...

We investigate the causes and consequences of the aging of the scientific workforce. Using novel data on the population of US chemistry faculty members over fifty years, we find that the secular increase in the age of the academic workforce has been mainly driven by the slowdown in faculty...

We examine the impact of Chinese import competition on patenting, IT, R&D and TFP using a panel of up to half a million firms over 1996-2007 across twelve European countries. We correct for endogeneity using the removal of product-specific quotas following China's entry into the World Trade...

How do firms and inventors move through knowledge space as they develop their innovations? We propose a method for tracking patterns of exploration and exploitation in patenting behaviour in the US for the period since 1920. Our exploration measure is constructed from the text of patents and...