Inference And the Board of Directors: The Cognitive Design of New Venture Governance
Research on the governance of new ventures has traditionally focused on mitigating incentive misalignment between founders and investors through boards’ incentive design, monitoring, and control rights. We identify a distinct governance problem: managing cognitive misalignment—systematic differences in beliefs about an opportunity’s underlying value. Cognitive misalignment arises from the inherent ...
Daniel Elfenbein, Washington University in St. Louis
Friday, May 29, 2026 | 10:30am-12:00pm | Room 335
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History as a Strategic Guide: Lessons from Two Centuries of Media Evolution for the Future
The past two centuries of electronic media evolution provide a rich historical laboratory for understanding contemporary patterns of socio-technological change. From the advent of telegraph in the nineteenth century, through the successive emergence of radio, broadcast television, and digital platforms, to the current proliferation of generative artificial intelligence, each new technology has precipitated ...
Marko Skoric, City University of Hong Kong
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 335
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Hiring Talent in Technology-Advanced Economies: A Potential Threat to Host-Country Advantage?
Foreign MNEs from latecomer countries are often portrayed as aggressively recruiting technological talent and thereby threatening host-country advantage. Yet whether—and how—these MNEs can springboard via hiring remains unclear. Using archival data on 486 MNEs operating in the U.S. (1999–2016) and interviews with skilled inventors, we uncover a paradox in the springboard-via-hiring logic: externally,...
Victor Cui, University of Waterloo
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 331
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Trading, Information, and Financial Fragility
We develop a model linking informed trading in financial markets to depositor coordination and bank stability. A speculative trader receives a private signal about the bank’s fundamental and trades strategically in the financial market, where prices are determined based on noisy aggregate order flow. Depositors observe the stock price, which may reveal trader’s signal, and use it together with their ...
Zhen Zhou, Tsinghua University
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 339
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Jargon: A Dynamic Theory of Social Closure
This paper develops a dynamic theory of jargon as a mechanism of social closure. Insiders communicate to deepen productive knowledge, but their communication leaks knowledge to outsiders. Some outsiders become poseurs, able to mimic the first layer of insider language; some poseurs become amateurs, able to provide valuable service. We show that jargon is not simply a barrier to entry. It establishes ...
Jiahua Che, China Europe International Business School
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 337
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How Monetary Policy Is Made: Lessons from Historical FOMC Discussions
We construct a new dataset of FOMC meeting transcripts from 1966 to 1990 to analyze the sources of heterogeneity in individual monetary policy preferences and study how this heterogeneity shapes policy decisions. Using these detailed discussions, we manually quantify and characterize each FOMC participant’s preferred policies along with their reasoning and justifications. We show that participants'...
Marc Dordal Carreras, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Wednesday, May 20, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 337
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Too much at stake? Entrepreneurial Wealth Concentration and Firm Performance
Using detailed Danish registry data, we study how entrepreneurial wealth concentration—the share of an entrepreneur’s wealth invested in the firm—affects performance. We exploit the marital divorce of a minority shareholder as an exogenous source of variation in the majority shareholder’s concentration. Divorce generates a negative income shock that induces the minority shareholder to sell their ...
Fabiano Schivardi, LUISS University
Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 339
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The Value of Corporate Patent Utilization
We use textual analysis of firm patent and product filings to construct a novel measure of patent utilization rate, which reflects the extent to which a firm’s patents are applied in its new products. We validate the measure by showing that patents utilized in new products are more likely to belong to firms’ core technology fields, receive more self-citations, and are less likely to be sold, and ...
Jarrad Harford, University of Washington
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 | 2:00pm-4:00pm | Room 337
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Hiring Difficulties and Firm Growth
We estimate the causal impact of hiring difficulties on firms’ outcomes. Using a shift share identification strategy, we show that hiring difficulties have negative effects on firms’ employment, capital, sales, and profits. Quantitatively, a one-standard-deviation change in firm exposure to hiring difficulties explains around 9% of the variation in firm size. Firms adjust to hiring difficulties by ...
Julien Sauvagnat, Bocconi University
Wednesday, April 29, 2026 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 339
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Bang for the Buck: Aggregate Impact of Firm-Level R&D Incentives
How do R&D incentives affect individual firms and, in turn, shape aggregate growth? We develop a novel empirical framework, grounded in endogenous growth theory, allowing us to measure firms’ responsiveness to R&D incentives and to aggregate such responses. After validating the predictions of our framework using three different micro-datasets, we apply it to Compustat data. We find that (i) ignoring ...
Petr Sedlacek, UNSW Sydney
Wednesday, April 29, 2026 | 10:30am-12:00pm | Room 337
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