Research In Progress

TBD. 

Publicly-funded innovations create social value, but the welfare consequences depend on who captures that value. This paper develops a framework for measuring the incidence of public innovation and applies it to R&D funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, combining legislative funding windfalls with firm-level exposure to DOE-funded technologies to estimate how public innovation reallocates value across workers, capital owners, and consumers. 

Innovation for social progress — innovation that addresses the world’s most pressing problems, like climate change — is characterized by a unique “double-externality” challenge. Knowledge spillovers impact incentives to invest while production and consumption externalities (e.g., pollution) also shape incentives through prices. In this paper, I develop a framework showing how an under-explored interdependence between imperfect appropriability and “incorrect” pricing impacts the direction of innovation. I then leverage carbon price shocks and policy-induced variation in the user cost of R&D to estimate the effects of knowledge spillovers, “incorrect” prices, and their interaction on green versus dirty patenting.

This paper examines how a technology area’s progress and trajectory (i.e., its “momentum”) shape the returns to frontier R&D, and in particular, how and when novelty produces value. We use proprietary data on awards from ARPA-E to start-ups, established firms, and university-based technology developers.

Firms and investors are increasingly committing to improve their environmental performance, but little is known about effective strategies for doing so. In this paper, we exploit variation in exposure to financing shocks to provide new evidence on how the (mis)alignment of firms’ environmental management practices with firm strategy impacts human capital formation and green innovation in pollution-intensive industries.