This article discusses the three concepts of "learning," "entrepreneurship" and "dynamics of the firm" in order to bridge some of the gap between micro and macro levels of analysis in evolutionary economics. This article addresses the following four issues: 1) Localized learning dependent on the...

One of the most heated discussions in economics in recent years has concerned the relationship between market structure and innovation. After a half-century of debate and innumerable studies, the consensus is that there is no clear answer to the question. On a concrete level, the uncertainty...

These are neither the best of times nor the worst of times for the pharmaceutical industry, or for global public health. Media reports regarding recent legal developments would suggest that the originator pharmaceutical industry is facing a new and dangerous threat to its long-term welfare,...

In 1996, the chemical firm Monsanto bought a plant breeder that had developed a new corn hybrid, which could withstand Monsanto’s powerful herbicide Roundup. Due to the pre-existing structure of the US plant-breeding industry, this acquisition and Monsanto’s acquisition of five other corn...

This paper studies how competition impacts innovative firms’ voluntary disclosure of product quality information. Our empirical context is the pharmaceutical industry, where firms must decide whether to disclose drug quality information acquired in clinical trials. Leveraging variation in...

We examine the role of spillover learning in shaping the value of exploratory versus incremental R&D. Using data from drug development, we show that novel drug candidates generate more knowledge spillovers than incremental ones. Despite being less likely to reach regulatory approval, they are...

Leveraging the detailed project-level data on biotech startups and their IPO records, this paper studies how adverse selection in capital markets affects financing decisions of entrepreneurs and firm values. By structurally estimating a dynamic model that features strategic experimentation and...

The decision to cooperate within R&D joint ventures is often based on expert advice such advice typically originates in a due diligence process, which assesses the R&D joint ventures profitability, for example, by appraising the achievability of synergies. We show that if the experts who advise...

This paper studies how reduced oversight creates an incentive for process innovation. With incomplete contracts, tight monitoring of workers creates a ratchet effect of innovation. Under reduced oversight, a worker accrues private knowledge about his innovation, which serves as a substitute for...

I propose a theory of debt maturity as an incentive device to motivate innovation when contracts are fundamentally incomplete and shaped by ex-post renegotiation. The financing of innovative firms must balance two goals. On the one hand, since innovation is inherently risky, the entrepreneur...