Routines are important to competitive advantage. While the routines literature deals with their replication, it tends to ignore their origins. One exception is Winter and Szulanski who argue routines are discovered over time. We offer a competing view that routines be designed-- to both improve...

Entrepreneurship is valued in part because it stimulates Schumpeter’s gale of creative destruction. A popular view, reinforced by recent empirical work on regulatory reform, is that regulation inhibits entrepreneurship and innovation. However dismantling regulation is ill-advised, since...

Approximately 80-90 percent of new firms ultimately fail. The tendency is to think of this failure as wasteful. We, however, examine whether there are economic benefits to offset the waste. We characterize three potential mechanisms through which excess entry affects market structure, firm...

This paper examines whether declining research productivity can be explained by fishing out—is the production of new knowledge decreasing in the level of existing knowledge? We estimate the knowledge production function for U.S. firms and find instead that knowledge production is increasing in...

Federally funded development (as share of GDP) has declined 82% since its peak in 1964, which suggests it is a likely contributor to comparable declines in US R&D productivity and nominal GDP growth. For this to be true however, federal RD contracts must increase the productivity of firms’...

One explanation for declining R&D productivity is demise of industrial research labs. We test that explanation using data from U.S. industrial lab directories from 1921 to 1998. We find the number, size and prevalence of labs have all increased rather than declined. Accordingly, we consider the...