This paper studies how innovative firms manage their innovation portfolios after filing for Chapter 11 reorganization using three decades of data. We find that they sell off core (i.e., technologically critical and valuable), rather than peripheral, patents in bankruptcy. The selling pattern is driven almost entirely by firms with greater use of secured debt, and the mechanism is secured creditors exercising their control rights on collateralized patents. Creditor-driven patent sales in bankruptcy have implications for technology diffusion--the sold patents diffuse more slowly under new ownership and are more likely to be purchased by patent trolls.

This paper documents differences across higher education courses in the coverage of frontier knowledge. Applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the text of 1.7M syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the "education-innovation gap," a syllabus's relative proximity to old and new knowledge. We show that courses differ greatly in the extent to which they cover frontier knowledge. Instructors play a big role in shaping course content; instructors who are active researchers teach more frontier knowledge. More selective and better funded schools, and those enrolling socio-economically advantaged students, teach more frontier knowledge. Students from these schools are more likely to complete a doctoral degree, produce more patents, and earn more after graduation.

This paper studies how hedge fund activism reshapes corporate innovation. Firms targeted by hedge fund activists experience an improvement in innovation efficiency during the five-year period following the intervention. Despite a tightening in R&D expenditures, target firms experience increases in innovation output, measured by both patent counts and citations, with stronger effects seen among firms with more diversified innovation portfolios. We also find that the reallocation of innovative resources and the redeployment of human capital contribute to the refocusing of the scope of innovation. Finally, additional tests refute alternative explanations attributing the improvement to mean reversion, sample attrition, management’s voluntary reforms, or activists’ stock-picking abilities.

This paper investigates why industrial firms conduct Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) investment in entrepreneurial companies. I test alternative views on CVC by exploiting the entry, investment, and termination decisions of CVC divisions. CVC entry concentrates in firms that experience deteriorations of internal innovation. At the investment stage, CVCs select startups with a similar technological focus but that have a non-overlapping knowledge base, and they integrate technologies generated from these ventures that create strategic value. CVCs are terminated when parent firms' innovation recovers. Overall, the strategic desire to fix innovation weaknesses after adverse shocks motivates firms to adopt CVCs.

We study the cross-sector allocation of R&D resources in a multisector growth model with an innovation network, where one sector's past innovations may benefit other sectors' future innovations. Theoretically, we solve for the optimal path of R&D resource allocation. We show a planner valuing long-term growth should allocate more R&D toward upstream sectors in the innovation network, but the incentive is muted in open economies that rely on foreign knowledge spillovers. We derive sufficient statistics for evaluating the welfare cost of R&D misallocation. Empirically, we build the global innovation network based on patent citations and establish its empirical importance for knowledge spillovers. We evaluate R&D allocative efficiency across countries using model-based sufficient statistics. Japan has the highest allocative efficiency among the advanced economies. For the U.S., reducing R&D misallocation down to Japan's level could generate more than 28% welfare gains.

This paper demonstrates a new agency channel through which payout taxation affects corporate investment. Lower payout taxes increase managers' cash flow right to the firm via managerial ownership, which further aligns shareholder-manager incentives but exacerbates managerial risk exposures to the firm. I develop a framework to test this channel and provide supporting evidence using a setting of innovation investments around the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut. Aligning incentives stimulates the innovation input and output. Aggravated managerial risk aversion impedes innovation quantity and also shifts innovation to safer and more incremental directions. I also explore underlying operational channels and interactive mechanisms.

Persuasive communication functions not only through content but also delivery, e.g., facial expression, tone of voice, and diction. This paper examines the persuasiveness of delivery in start-up pitches. Using machine learning (ML) algorithms to process full pitch videos, we quantify persuasion in visual, vocal, and verbal dimensions. Positive (i.e., passionate, warm) pitches increase funding probability. Yet conditional on funding, high-positivity startups underperform. Women are more heavily judged on delivery when evaluating single-gender teams, but they are neglected when co-pitching with men in mixed-gender teams. Using an experiment, we show persuasion delivery works mainly through leading investors to form inaccurate beliefs.

We study the optimal allocation of R&D resources in an endogenous growth model with an innovation network, through which one sector's past innovations may benefit other sectors' future innovations. First, we provide closed-form sufficient statistics for the optimal path of R&D resource allocation, and we show that planners valuing long-term growth should allocate more R&D toward key sectors that are upstream in the innovation network. Second, we extend to an open-economy setting and illustrate an incentive for countries to free-ride on fundamental technologies: an economy more reliant on foreign knowledge spillovers has less incentive to direct resources toward innovation-upstream sectors, leading to cross-country differences in unilaterally optimal R&D allocations across sectors. Third, we build the global innovation network based on over 30 million global patents and establish its empirical importance for knowledge spillovers. Fourth, we apply the model to evaluate R&D allocations across countries and time. Adopting optimal R&D allocations can generate substantial welfare improvements across the globe. For the United States, R&D misallocation accounts for about 0.68 percentage points of missing annual growth since the 2000s.

This paper asks whether startups react more to changing investment opportunities than more mature firms do. We use the fact that a region's pre-existing industrial structure creates exogenous variation in the severity of its exposure to nation-wide manufacturing shocks to develop an instrument for changing investment opportunities, and examine employment creation in the non-tradable sector as a response to those opportunities. Startups are much more responsive to changing local economic conditions than older firms. Moreover, their responsiveness doubles in areas with better access to small business finance, suggesting that financing constraints are an important brake on job creation in the startup sector. Although we focus mostly on the non-tradable sector for empirical identification, our results extend to other sectors of the economy, indicating that the mechanisms we uncover are economically pervasive. This suggests that factors like organizational flexibility and innovativeness may be important drivers of job creation among startups.