This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of US wartime ship production. I show that estimation is easily colored by problems of unobserved product heterogeneity and sensitivity to specification of the learning curve. Using data...

Several theories of firm performance can explain the well-known observation that survival is positively related to age. However, a more mundane explanation – selection bias driven by variations in firm quality – may also underlie the phenomenon. This paper employs a 90-year plant-level panel...

This article is a supporting document to my paper “Selection and Firm Survival. Evidence from the Shipbuilding Industry, 1825-1914”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 87(1):26-36, February 2005. The article provides a basic description of data sources, coverage and limitations, along with...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on learning by doing. Many of the distinctive theoretical implications of learning by doing have been derived under the assumption that the cost-quantity relationships observed in numerous empirical studies are largely the result of...

This paper presents an explicit model of the entrepreneur’s role in organizing the work undertaken by employees. The model assumes that agents vary in their ability to carry out this task, and so in one sense the model is a special case of Lucas’ [Bell Journal of Economics, 9, pp. 508-523,...

This paper develops a model of marital dissolution based on communication difficulties. The quality of a marriage depends on the proximity of an action to a target. The target is unknown, and must be learned over time. Each individual receives private signals about the target, and can...

Various theories have been advanced for why employees leave incumbent firms to found firms in the same industry, which we call spinoffs. We review the accumulating evidence about spinoffs in various high-tech industries, highlighting the central role often played by disagreements. Because...

We construct a model of industry evolution in which the central force for change is the creation and destruction of submarkets. Firms expand when they are able to exploit new opportunities that arrive in the form of submarkets; they contract and ultimately exit when the submarkets in which they...

I report new evidence for localized knowledge spillovers identified by within-patent variations in the geographic matching rates of citations added by inventors and citations added by examiners. Evaluated at the mean citation lag, inventor citations are 20 percent more likely than examiner...

Private information induces individuals to self-select as subjects into clinical research trials, and it induces researchers to select which trials they conduct. We show that selection can induce ex ante therapeutic misconception and ex post disappointment among research subjects; and it...