Manufacturing accounts for more than three-quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The competitive shock to this sector emanating from China's economic ascent could in theory either augment or stifle U.S. innovation. Using three decades of U.S. patents matched to corporate owners, we quantify how...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of forward-looking asset-accumulation behavior among disability-insurance applicants, previously examined only in the theoretical literature. Using panel data from the RAND Health and Retirement Study, I show that rejected applicants for...

We study the impact of social identity on worker competition by exploiting the exogenous variations in workers' origins and the well-documented social divide between urban resident workers and rural migrant workers in large urban Chinese firms. We analyze data on weekly output, individual...

This chapter reviews the empirical economics literature on the impact of trade liberalization on firms' innovation-related outcomes. We define and examine four types of shocks to trade flows: import competition, export opportunities, access to imported intermediates, and foreign input...

The competitive shock to the U.S. manufacturing sector spurred by rising China import competition could either catalyze or stifle innovation. Using three distinct sources of variation to identify rising trade exposure, we provide a causal analysis of the effect of surging import competition on...

Using panel data from the RAND Health and Retirement Study, I show that rejected applicants for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) possess significantly more assets immediately prior to their application and exhibit lower labor force attachment than accepted applicants. These findings...

Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textile firm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assigned teammates affect an individual worker's behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme, and b) how such effects...

This chapter reviews the empirical economics literature on the impact of trade liberalization on firms' innovation-related outcomes. We define and examine four types of shocks to trade flows: import competition, export opportunities, access to imported intermediates, and foreign input...

This thesis contains three essays on innovation, productivity, and talent allocation. In Chapter 1, I use data on MIT bachelor’s graduates from 1980 to 2005 to study how short-term variations in economic conditions at the time of college graduation impact individuals’ long-term patent...

We provide some of the first rigorous evidence on performance spillovers and social network in the workplace. The data we use are rather extraordinary - weekly data for rejection rates (proportion of defective output) for all weavers in a firm during a 12 months (April 2003 - March 2004) period,...