Research

Working Papers

Common Ownership and the Market for Technology (Job Market Paper)

New version coming soon.

Does Institutional Ownership Composition Matter for Corporate Innovation? - with Bing Guo, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Todrà-Simats

[Paper]

Institutional investors vary greatly in their involvement in firm decisions. Whereas some institutional investors have incentives to actively monitor and influence firms in a firm-specific manner, others greatly rely on standard measures or the uniform recommendations of proxy advisors like the ISS. We study the heterogeneous effects of different institutional owners on firms' innovation strategy and outcomes. We find that institutional investors with monitoring incentives lead firms to acquire innovation from external sources, whereas blockholder (i.e. non-motivated) investors induce firms to invest in innovation mostly by developing their internal R&D. Both motivated owners and blockholders have a positive effect on patent and citation outcomes, but the effect of motivated investors is 2.5 times larger than that of blockholders. The mechanisms behind these effects are different. Whereas motivated investors encourage innovation because they reduce managerial career concerns, blockholders do so by improving firms' corporate governance. These results shed light on the importance of active monitor funds to help firms achieve value-maximizing outcomes.

Work in Progress

Firms' Acquisition Strategy: The Influence of Institutional Owners - with Bing Guo, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Todrà-Simats

Publication

Automation and Sectoral Reallocation - with Tommaso Santini and Eugenia Vella. Series - Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, special issue: Juan J. Dolado. (2021)

Empirical evidence in Dauth et al. (J Eur Econ Assoc, 2021) suggests that industrial robot adoption in Germany has led to a sectoral reallocation of employment from manufacturing to services, leaving total employment unaffected. We rationalize this evidence through the lens of a general equilibrium model with two sectors, matching frictions and endogenous participation. Automation induces firms to create fewer vacancies and job seekers to search less in the automatable sector (manufacturing). The service sector expands due to the sectoral complementarity in the production of the final good and a positive wealth effect for the household. Analysis across steady states shows that the reduction in manufacturing employment can be offset by the increase in service employment. The model can also replicate the magnitude of the decline in the ratio of manufacturing employment to service employment in Germany between 1994 and 2014.