Events

We investigate the impact of misconduct on the financing and exit opportunities of entrepreneurial ventures that are technologically related to the misconduct perpetrators. To do so, we consider all reported misconduct cases affecting US startups during 1998-2020 and estimate differences-in-differences models saturated with fixed effects. We show that startups producing similar technologies as the misconduct perpetrators become less likely to obtain financing and raise smaller amounts after the misconduct event is reported in the news, relative to startups developing dissimilar technologies located outside the perpetrators state. The strongest negative effects of misconduct are found to be associated with technological misconduct and sexual harassment, followed by financial fraud, while misconducts related to intellectual property infringements have statistically insignificant impact. Startups related to misconduct perpetrators are no less likely to be acquired than unrelated startups.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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Startup Role in Post-war Rebuilding of the Ukrainian Economy (Iuliia Gernego, Kyiv National Economic University)
Innovative Entrepreneurship in Turbulent Times of War in Ukraine (Tetiana Shkoda, Kyiv National Economic University)

This paper shows that gender inequality affects the extent to which scientific ideas are used to develop new technologies. Despite strong incentives to select the most promising ideas, we claim that inventors are more likely to build on men’s rather than women’s science. We exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. The papers led by female scientists receive on average 40% fewer patent citations than their male-led twin. We examine several explanations for this gender gap in inventors’ attention. The pattern of results is consistent with inventors’ value expectations being a driver of the attention gap, beyond differences in the salience, overall productivity, and academic impact of scientists’ research. These findings have implications for our understanding of frictions in science-based technology development, as well as for broader theories of how gender inequality shapes cumulative innovation.

Contact person: Michael Rose

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This study examines when and how engineers who connect to brokers who span structural holes in communication networks can improve innovative performance at their firm. Using survey data on social networks at a large B2B software company, we find that engineers who pay attention to information from brokers achieve higher innovative performance than those who pay little (or no) attention to such information. Moreover, we find that the advantage of paying attention to brokers’ information is magnified when focal engineers are embedded in highly constrained networks. Yet, our post-hoc analysis reveals that engineers normally allocate less attention to information from brokers than that from local colleagues partially because brokers’ information is perceived to be less relevant to the engineers. These findings about the crucial role of attention allocation for secondhand brokers make contributions to studies of social networks and innovation.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

In this research, we investigate where (in which neighborhood) newly arrived immigrants find their first job as a function of co-ethnic commuters. Using detailed employer- employee matched data, we are able to isolate ethnic peers from overall commuter flows. We argue that ethnic peers can provide better information about jobs in their workplace location than in other parts of the city. Exploiting this (information) heterogeneity in a conditional logit model allows us to control for individual-level and neighborhood- level heterogeneity. Our analysis provides causal evidence of positive effects of ethnic networks on labor market integration by reducing information frictions.

Contact person: Anastasiia Lutsenko

We provide causal evidence on the effects of language barriers on the speed and extent of knowledge diffusion by exploiting the introduction of pre-grant publications in the US. Language barriers account for almost half the diffusion lag of Japan-originating knowledge to US-based inventors, relative to Japan-based inventors. This acceleration is significant only for firms with low appropriation advantage in translation (small R&D scale, or little involvement in the Japanese market), and is larger for the diffusion of high-quality inventions, suggesting difficulties of quality-targeted translation. Thus, pregrant publication provides a significant public good for cumulative innovation through accelerated access to translated foreign patents.

The European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective in 2018, and it puts restrictions on the processing and use of health data in clinical research. Besides limiting cross-border data exchange between EU and non-EU-based researchers, obtaining informed consent with regard to data privacy became more challenging.

The impact on clinical research is studied looking at case reports, a timely format for clinical research results. Using a regression discontinuity design taking into account that not all case reports are affected by the policy change, it is found that there was a decline in publishing clinical case reports by EU-based authors in the order of around 12 percent following the GDPR introduction. This decline is robust for various alternative model specifications and data subsets.

Follow-on analyses show heterogeneity among EU member states in terms of publication output, seemingly rooted in different institutionalized contexts, implying that clinical researchers in some countries struggle more than in others, which raises questions on equal opportunities for clinical research following a policy change that aims at standardizing data privacy in Europe. It is also found that rare and non-rare cases are affected alike.

Overall, the GDPR introduction may negatively affect knowledge diffusion, negatively impacting patient health.

Contact person: Michael E. Rose

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Sharing lessons from experience (hereafter war stories) by successful entrepreneurs is a common practice in training programs for de novo entrepreneurs. Yet, war stories’ content and their effects on audiences is unknown. We examine this issue through a field-experiment in Singapore during 2019-2020, on 339 de novo entrepreneurs randomly assigned to two treatment arms: training by successful entrepreneurs sharing their war stories or training by experienced instructors imparting structured innovation strategy frameworks. We tracked venture performance until 2022. Abductive analysis of war-stories’ content revealed that successful entrepreneurs encouraged de novo entrepreneurs to focus on their ventures’ survival. Furthermore, ventures led by de novo entrepreneurs exposed to war-stories treatment experienced comparatively greater revenue growth, especially when successful and de novo entrepreneurs were similar on nationality or race.

Contact: Marina Chugunova

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Robotizing to Compete? Evidence from Portuguese manufacturing Exporters
Presenter: Klaus Keller (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition)
Discussant(s): N.N.

Valuation Asymmetry between Licensors and Licensees of Algorithms
Presenter: Joy Wu (ISTO) 
Discussant(s): N.N.