fraudulent financial reporting and technological capability in the information technology sector a resource based perspective motivated by the disproportionately high incidence of fraudulent financial reporting in the it sector where technological capability is a major source of competitive advantage this study investigates the possible relationship between technological capability and fraud probability in the it sector technological capability is measured by a firm s technical efficiency relative to peers in transforming cumulative r d resources into innovative output which is a source of competitive advantage according to the resource based view rbv of the firm technical efficiency is estimated via data envelopment analysis a sample of fraud firms taken from accounting and auditing enforcement releases is matched with control samples of non fraud firms consistent with the rbv technological capability is found to have a negative and economically significant effect on fraud probability moreover fraud probability is insignificantly associated with the scale efficiency of innovative activities as investment in r d resources per se is not a source of sustainable competitive advantage

lone inventors as sources of breakthroughs myth or reality are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions it has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails i e that a greater probability of breakthroughs comes at the cost of a greater probability of failures in contrast we propose that collaboration can have opposite effects at the two extremes it reduces the probability of very poor outcomes because of more rigorous selection processes while simultaneously increasing the probability of extremely successful outcomes because of greater recombinant opportunity in creative search analysis of over half a million patented inventions supports these arguments individuals working alone especially those without affiliation to organizations are less likely to achieve breakthroughs and more likely to invent particularly poor outcomes quantile regressions demonstrate that the effect is more than an upward mean shift we find partial mediation of the effect of collaboration on extreme outcomes by the diversity of technical experience of team members and by the size of team members external collaboration networks supporting our meta argument for the importance of examining each tail of the distribution separately experience diversity helps trim poor outcomes significantly more than it helps create breakthroughs relative to the effect of external networks

the colorblind crowd founder race and performance in crowdfunding the dearth of minority entrepreneurs has received increasing media attention but few academic analyses in particular the funding process creates challenges for either audit or correspondence methods making it difficult to assess the role or type of discrimination influencing resource providers we use a novel approach that combines analyses of 7 617 crowdfunding projects with an experimental design to identify whether african american men are discriminated against and whether this reflects statistical taste based or unconscious bias on the part of prospective supporters we find that african american men are significantly less likely than similar white founders to receive funding and that prospective supporters rate identical projects as lower in quality when they believe the founder is an african american male we conclude that the reduction in perceived quality does not reflect conscious assumptions of differences in founder ability or disamenity but rather an unconscious assumption that black founders are lower quality in two additional experiments we identify three means of reducing this bias through additional evidence of quality via third party endorsements i e awards evidence of prior support through evidence that african american founders have succeeded previously and by removing indicators of the founder s race the online appendix is available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2017 2774 this paper was accepted by toby stuart entrepreneurship and innovation

innovation outcomes in a distributed organization intrafirm mobility and access to resources prior research has established a relation between intrafirm mobility and innovation outcomes at distributed organizations the literature has also uniformly agreed on the mechanism underlying this relationship the sharing of tacit knowledge and recombination of ideas that occurs because of intrafirm mobility but a second mechanism may also be at work intrafirm mobility might help distant employees secure access to resources for their innovative projects using unique data on travel employment and patenting for 1 315 inventors at the indian research and development r d center of a fortune 50 multinational i find that intrafirm mobility in the form of short duration business trips from a distant r d location to headquarters is positively related to higher subsequent patenting at the individual level i also find mobility immediately prior to meetings at which r d funds are most likely to be disbursed to be related to higher subsequent patenting this study sheds new light on how intrafirm mobility a

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

short run employment functions when the speed of adjustment depends on the unemployment rate a bstratacross industry and country comparisons have found the speed of adjustment in short run employment functions to be positively related to the rate of unemployment the present paper develops a time series model in which the reaction coefficient varies with unemployment and estimates it for the manufacturing sectors of the eight oecd countries for which suitable data are available the new model is non linear and is estimated using full information maximum likelihood procedures application of the log likelihood ratio test finds that the new vanable reaction coefficient model is superior to the fixed reaction coefficient model for the united states canada australia austria ireland and the united kingdom

real wages over the business cycle evidence from panel data one topic on which keynes did not disagree with classical economists was the cyclical behavior of real wages keynes 1936 as well as various classical writers predicted that real wages should move countercyclically quoting the general theory p 17 in general an increase in employment can only occur through the accompaniment of a decline in real wages thus i am not disputing this vital fact which the classical economists have rightly asserted as indefeasible this prediction is based on the premise of competition and a given short run capital stock increases in employment then correspond to more intensive use of capital and through diminishing product lower real wages for this reason evidence by dunlop 1938 and tarshis 1939 that real wages move procyclically was viewed as paradoxical both dunlop and tarshis based their findings on an observed positive correlation between real and money wages which given the procyclical movement of money wages implies a positive correlation between

catching up by hiring the case of huawei hiring experts in centers of state of the art technology is an important way in which a multinational enterprise mne can gain competitive advantage and yet use of this mechanism remains under researched this study uses the case of a chinese mne that recently achieved a leading position in the telecommunications market huawei technologies taking the perspective of huawei s offshore hires i find that greenfield investments contributed to overcoming liabilities of origin and outsidership in the global telecommunications industry nevertheless even now that huawei has caught up with industry incumbents its output capabilities remain dependent on the innovation capabilities of its offshore experts

do immigrants affect firm specific wages we propose and test a novel effect of immigration on wages existing studies have focused on the wage effects that result from changes in the aggregate labour supply in a competitive labour market we argue that if labour markets are not fully competitive immigrants might also affect wage formation at the most disaggregate level the workplace using linked employer employee data we find that an increased use of low skilled immigrant workers has a significantly negative effect on the wages of native workers at the workplace also when controlling for potential endogeneity of the immigrant share using both fixed effects and instrumental variables

matchmaker matchmaker the effect of old boy networks on job match quality earnings and tenure firms often view job applicant referrals from current employees as more informative than direct applications or referrals through formal labor market intermediaries such as placement firms we argue that old boy networks reduce employers uncertainty about worker productivity using jovanovic s job matching model we show that workers hired through the old boy network should 1 earn higher initial salaries 2 experience lower subsequent wage growth on the job and 3 stay on the job longer than otherwise comparable workers hired from outside the network we find considerable support for this theory using data from the 1972 survey of natural and social scientists and engineers

uncertain intellectual property conditions and knowledge appropriation strategies evidence from the genomics industry innovating science and technology based firms often endure a sustained period of uncertain intellectual property rights ipr protection before patents could be granted to their valuable knowledge assets this problem is exacerbated as firms increasingly develop their innovations or operate in countries with weak ipr institutional environments but how does ipr uncertainty affect firms strategy toward knowledge appropriation capturing of economic value from their knowledge assets and toward providing access to these knowledge assets drawing on research from the economics of science and intellectual property strategy we examine this question using a novel panel data covering 362 firms and organizations in the knowledge intensive genomics industry based on all genomics patents and matching papers from 1988 to 2005 we find that under uncertain ipr conditions firms reveal and accumulate more knowledge through open science follow on publishing but shift to knowledge appropriation through commercial science follow on patenting when ipr uncertainty is narrowed this effect is most salient when firms develop their knowledge assets or operate under strong ipr institutional regime for highly science based knowledge assets firms continue tapping into open science for access and reciprocity in knowledge acquisition from the scientific community these findings highlight the role of patent grant as a potential lever to shape firms knowledge processes and long term innovative capacity and the emergence of a concerted science strategy employed by firms

research productivity over the life cycle evidence for academic scientists the relationship between age and the publishing productivity of ph d scientists is analyzed using data from the survey of doctorate recipients national research council and the science citation index the longitudinal nature of the data allows for the identification of pure aging effects in five of the six areas studied life cycle aging effects are present only in particle physics where scientists often speak of being on a religious quest is the indication that scientific productivity is not investment motivated vintage effects are also considered the expectation that the latest educated are the most productive is not generally supported by the data copyright 1991 by american economic association

recruitment knowledge integration and modes of innovation abstract this paper investigates how the strength and intrinsic characteristics of firms knowledge bases and processing routines have evolved with the past inflow of employees the empirical analysis is based on linked public register and innovation survey data for norway it finds that recruitment from universities research institutes and higher education institutions has increased the capacity of firms to generate technical inventions yet the organizational knowledge bases and processing routines on which commercial innovation output depends have been strengthened only by the recruitment that has occurred from related industries implications for research management and policy are drawn

adopting knowledge from reverse innovations transnational patents and signaling from an emerging economy is there knowledge adoption of innovations from emerging economies we theorize that to help overcome information asymmetry across countries granting patents to technology in the emerging economy of china can serve as a signal of technology potential and market opportunity to enhance technological knowledge adoption in a developed economy such as the united states the effect may be greater in a complex technology sector with high information asymmetry than in a discrete technology sector and in regions with less developed market intermediaries where information asymmetry is high our difference in differences estimates using 4226 china u s patent dyads and comparable u s patents support our hypotheses

employment in the british coal industry a test of the labour demand model the authors test the conventional model of labor demand against the alternative that bargaining takes place over both wages and employme nt for a time series cross section data set covering the british coal industry they note the difficulty of identifying the contract curve under the alternative hypothesis and suggest the use of variables affecting the union and management status quo points as instruments for the endogenous wage they find that outside variables such as benefits and manufacturing wages are important in determining the level of employment thus rejecting the labor demand model copyright 1988 by royal economic society

intertemporal rules with variable speed of adjustment an application to u k manufacturing employment this paper presents a procedure to estimate intertemporal dynamic decision rules where adjustment costs are assumed to be variable the estimation is based on the euler equation for purposes of illustration the authors concentrate on an employment function for the u k manufacturing sector where they find very significant effects of some variables that influence adjustment costs finally they point out an empirical result that has interesting implications when evaluating tests of efficient bargain models copyright 1989 by royal economic society

recruiting for ideas how firms exploit the prior inventions of new hires when firms recruit inventors they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas but do hiring firms actually increase their use of new recruits prior inventions our estimates suggest they do quite significantly in fact by approximately 219 on average however this does not necessarily reflect widespread learning by hiring in fact we estimate that a recruit s exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit s immediate collaborative network furthermore although one might expect the recruit s role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time we base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms citations to the recruits premove patents specifically we employ a difference in differences approach to compare premove versus postmove citation rates for the recruits prior patents and corresponding matched pair control patents our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow 1 it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross sectional comparison 2 it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample and 3 it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns this paper was accepted by kamalini ramdas entrepreneurship and innovation

the migration of technical workers using panel data on the danish population we estimated the revealed preferences of scientists and engineers for the places in which they choose to work our results indicate that these technical workers exhibit substantial sensitivity to differences in wages but that they have even stronger preferences for living close to family and friends the magnitude of these preferences moreover suggests that the greater geographic mobility of scientists and engineers relative to the population as a whole stems from more pronounced variation across regions in the wages that they can expect these results remain robust to estimation on a sample of individuals who must select new places of work for reasons unrelated to their preferences those who had been employed at establishments that discontinued operations

general education versus vocational training evidence from an economy in transition abstract this paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training during romania s transition to a market economy we examine a 1973 educational reform that shifted a large proportion of students from vocational training to general education using census and household survey data we analyze the effect of this policy with a regression discontinuity design we find that men affected by the policy are significantly less likely to work in manual or craft related occupations but have similar levels of labor market participation and earnings compared to their counterparts unaffected by the policy we conclude that differences in labor market returns between graduates of vocational and general schools are largely driven by selection

the rejuvenation of inventors through corporate spinouts this article focuses on corporate spinouts as a strategy that can rejuvenate the inventive efforts of inventors with a long tenure in the same company we rely on an unbalanced panel of 5 604 inventor year observations to study a matched sample of 431 inventors employed by the xerox corporation and find evidence in support of three predictions first inventors who join a spinout increase the extent of exploration in their inventive activities second they decrease the extent to which they rely on the parent organization s knowledge third because long tenured employees through socialization tend to progressively adopt more exploitative behavior than short tenured members they benefit relatively more from the spinout experience these results are robust to several econometric specifications that try to account for the endogeneity of the inventors decision to join the spinout for the fact that spinouts inventive activity may be intrinsically different from that of the parent company and for the possible presence of novel external stimuli for those who join spinouts the data provide large sample evidence consistent with the idea that socialization reduces opportunities for organizational learning we discuss the implications for theory and practice

the role of relative performance in inter firm mobility of inventors abstract prior research has emphasized the influence of inter firm mobility on knowledge flows and innovation yet we have an incomplete picture of the antecedents of inventor mobility building on theoretical traditions related to decision making based on limited asymmetric bounded information and economic and other incentives our paper suggests that after controlling for individual performance and other variables previously shown to affect inter organizational mobility an inventor s performance relative to his co patenting group alters his likelihood of mobility our analysis of 2648 inventors in the pharmaceutical industry shows that for those performing above their reference group of past and current co inventors in patenting an increase in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility and for those performing below the reference group a decrease in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility we also find that when inventors have more external scientific collaborations their likelihood of mobility increases and this variable moderates the relationship between the performance gap and mobility but only for those performing above their peers