We conduct the first empirical test of the knowledge burden hypothesis, one of several theories advanced to explain increasing team sizes in science. For identification, we exploit the collapse of the USSR as an exogenous shock to the knowledge frontier causing a sudden release of previously...

To what extent does "false science" impact the rate and direction of scientific change? We examine the impact of more than 1,100 scientific retractions on the citation trajectories of articles that are related to retracted papers in intellectual space but were published prior to the retraction...

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While research errors are as relevant to the knowledge economy as defects are to the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal...

While the cumulative nature of knowledge is recognized as central to economic growth, the microeconomic foundations of cumulativeness are less understood. This paper investigates the impact of a research-enhancing institution on cumulativeness, highlighting two effects. First, a selection effect...

The establishment and growth of industrial research laboratories is one of the key organizational innovations affecting technological progress in the United States in the 20th century. In this paper, we investigate the rise of industrial research laboratories in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry...

While there is widespread agreement among economists and management scholars that knowledge spillovers exist and have important economic consequences, researchers know substantially less about the "micro mechanisms" of spillovers -- about the degree to which they are geographically localized,...

Motivated by differences in R&D productivity across advanced economies, this paper presents an empirical examination of the determinants of country-level production of international patents. We introduce a novel framework based on the concept of national innovative capacity. National innovative...

For many years, business turnarounds have captured the attention of scholars and fascinated executives. Yet despite their centrality as a business phenomenon, little is known about the prevalence or trajectory of turnarounds. This paper provides evidence on a broad cross-section of publicly...