Technological innovation drives human welfare (a picture is worth a thousand words–see Figure 1 of Robert Fogel’s “Catching up with the Economy“). The private sector and the government in the U.S. alone collectively invest around $500 billion each year on technological innovation. But only a fraction of these investments succeed. Motivated by the cost of these failures to society, my research studies how new science and technology are funded, and how innovators surmount the hurdles associated with commercializing new ideas.
Theoretically, I focus on informational barriers to innovation, motivated by Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow’s insight that since the value of new ideas is not generally known, inventors have to lay bare their proprietary knowledge to convince others of their ideas’ value. The ideas can be expropriated by others once revealed, thus hindering the disclosure of ideas to potential investors and partners, necessary for commercial success. This unique property of ideas adds to the usual informational challenges (e.g., asymmetric information and moral hazard) observed in other markets, and stifles innovation.
Despite economists’ long-standing interest in information frictions, empirical research on the topic as it pertains to innovation is in its infancy. One reason is that the frictions are hard to observe and measure in large samples, often requiring deep contextual knowledge and sophisticated statistical techniques to analyze. I draw on my experience as Thomas Alva Edison Scholar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as founder of the Endless Frontier Lab, a program to accelerate the commercial success of scientific breakthroughs, and my academic training as an empirical economist to analyze informational hurdles to innovation. Most of my recent papers also develop formal theory to interpret the evidence from my empirical studies.
How are public funds for scientific projects, the economic value of which are uncertain, allocated? Why do individuals become entrepreneurs and when are they successful? Can intellectual property rights, particularly patents, facilitate the commercialization of new ideas? These are some of the questions I have investigated in my research. My recent work studies talent-firm matching in innovative industries and patent design. I am also drawn to the causes and consequences of racial and gender disparities on innovation.
You can find my detailed research statement here. You can learn more about each of my projects by visiting my SSRN author’s page, or google scholar page.