TIES: Doctoral Theses

DOCTORAL THESIS TITLE:

“Evaluating Entrepreneurship Programs: Theory and Evidence” by Daniel Fehder (2016)
COMMITTEE:
Fiona Murray (Chair), Scott Stern, Ezra Zuckerman, Yael Hochberg (Rice University)
ABSTRACT:
This dissertation consists of three essays studying the impact of a relatively recent type of entrepreneurship
program (startup accelerators) on the performance of firms, regions, and the selection of early-stage projects in
the economy.
The first essay (joint work with Yael Hochberg) explores the impact of startup acceleartors on the level of
early-stage entrepreneurial activity in their region. Recent years have seen the rapid emergence of a new type of
program aimed at seeding startup companies. These programs, often referred to as accelerators, differ from
previously known seed-stage institutions such as incubators and angel groups. While proliferation of such
accelerators is evident, evidence on efficacy and role of these programs is scant. Nonetheless, local governments
and founders of such programs often cite the motivation for their establishment and funding as the desire to
transform their local economies through the establishment of a startup technology cluster in their region. In this
paper, we attempt to assess the impact that such programs can have on the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the
regions in which they are established, by exploring the effects of accelerators on the availability and provision of
seed and early stage venture capital funding in the local region.
The second essay explores the relationship between a startup's founding region, accelerator admission
and startup performance. Entrepreneurs combine resources from numerous sources as they build their firms but
are constrained by their social and geographic proximity to these resources. I use this insight as a starting point
to explore whether accelerators act as a complement or substitute for initial location. Using data from
MassChallenge, a leading startup accelerator in Boston, I use a regression discontinuity framework to evaluate
both the overall impact of the program on its portfolio of startups and its heterogeneity based on: 1) the level of
entrepreneurship resources in a startup’s founding region and 2) their ability to access those resources. Startups
birthed in neighborhoods with higher levels of entrepreneurial resources also derive a larger benefit from
admission to MassChallenge. Within the accelerator, startups from richer ecosystems also receive referrals at
higher rates, expanding their social capital relative to entrepreneurs from less rich regions. This finding suggests
that founding regions shape a startup’s performance within the accelerator and that accelerators change the way
in which startup founders are able to access and leverage resources in their home region.
The third essay explores the actual selection mechanisms inside an accelerator program. There is a
growing awareness that variation in the institutional arrangements used in the selection of ideas and ventures
can have an impact on the types of projects undertaken by innovators. This in turn shapes not only types of new
innovations but also the types of innovators we expect that enter the economy. To date, research has focused on
the composition of selection committees or differences across quite distinctive evaluation mechanisms (e.g.
crowds versus expert committees). This study hopes to ask a related but unanswered question: Will a fixed set of
judges evaluate a fixed set of businesses opportunities differently if they are assigned to different "evaluation
regimes". Specifically, we examine the degree to which status characteristics such as gender and elite education
are critical determinates of project evaluation across two distinct evaluation approaches – paper-based and
committee-based.. We find a strong, positive effect for gender and other characteristics in a committee-based
evaluation scheme where founder characteristics are more salient to judges. Our findings contribute to a deeper
understanding of both the evaluation of early-stage firms and the role of bias in decision making in settings of
considerable uncertainty.

DOCTORAL THESIS TITLE:

“Essays on the Impact of Digital Information on Innovation” by Abhishek Nagaraj (2016)
COMMITTEE:
Scott Stern (Chair), Pierre Azoulay, Catherine Tucker, Heidi Williams
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ABSTRACT:
This dissertation consists of three essays studying the impact of new, digital information on innovation in
different markets. The first essay sheds light on the impact of intellectual property in affecting the impact of new
information on innovation, while the second and third essays identify the role of maps as a novel form of
information and estimate their impact on innovation in different markets.
The first essay describes how intellectual property (copyright law) might affect the diffusion of newly,
digitized information. To evaluate this question, I focus on the digitization of a magazine as a part of the Google
Books digitization project and estimate the impact of copyright on magazine issues on subsequent reuse of
creative material on Wikipedia. I find that while digitization substantially increases the likelihood of reuse of
digitized material on Wikipedia, copyright might substantially impede reuse. The impact of copyright is most
pronounced for images as compared to text, for less-popular material with fewer substitutes and when the
underlying material is available in digital form.
The second essay highlights maps as a new form of digital information and posits that the availability of
publicly-provided maps is a crucial first step to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. In order to examine
this issue, I focus on the impact of the NASA Landsat satellite mapping program on shaping the level and
distribution of new discoveries between firms in the gold exploration industry. By comparing regions that quasi-
randomly did not receive mapping information due to technical failures in the satellites and cloud-cover in
imagery with regions that received publicly-provided maps, I estimate that new maps almost doubled the
likelihood of new discoveries in the global gold exploration market between 1950-1990 and also shifted the
sources of new discoveries from larger senior firms to younger and smaller junior firms.
The third essay continues to explore the role of maps in shaping innovation by focusing on the role of
mapping information in shaping innovative behavior in a crowdsourcing context. I analyze the impact of the US
Census TIGER street-mapping program on shaping innovative activity on OpenStreetMap, a popular online street-
mapping community similar to Wikipedia, and used widely on the internet in applications like Foursquare, Apple
Maps and Uber. I focus on an error in the use of TIGER information on OpenStreetMap due to which about 60%
of the US map benefited from highly-accurate TIGER maps from the US Census while the other 40% did not. In a
difference-in-difference framework, I find that counties that received accurate TIGER information were negatively
affected on OpenStreetMap as measured by the number of active users, the number of contributions and
importantly the production of follow-on knowledge.

DOCTORAL THESIS TITLE:

“The Endogeneity of Science: The Relationship of University Research to Industry and
Innovation” by Eunhee Sohn (2015)
COMMITTEE:
Scott Stern (Chair), Christian Catalini, Matt Marx, James Uterback
ABSTRACT:
This dissertation examines how the rate and direction of scientific science is endogenous to the
institutional, technological and economic environment. The first essay investigates how local industrial R&D
impacts the rate and direction of academic research by measuring the geographically localized spillover effect
from industry R&D headquarters to nearby universities. To address the endogeneity concerns due to selection of
industry location, this study exploits the exogenous entry into plant biotechnology R&D by pre-existing
agribusiness incumbents in non-biotechnology clusters.
As a further investigation into the phenomenon of reverse knowledge spillovers, the second essay
examines the individual antecedents that incentivize university scientists to engage in industry-relevant research. I
argue that young and less prominent scientists have a stronger incentive to exploit new opportunities provided by
the local industry due to the lack of alternatives and less opportunity cost. Results from the difference-in-
differences estimation are consistent with the theory.
Finally, the third essay provides a theoretical overview of the endogeneity of science, drawing out some
of the crucial pathways by which the structure, conduct and performance of the scientific research enterprise is
endogenous to the institutional environment, technology and economic objectives.

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DOCTORAL THESIS TITLE:
Essays on Entrepreneurial Strategy and Firm Performance” by Kenny Ching (2014)
COMMITTEE:
Scott Stern (Chair), Fiona E. Murray, Yasheng Huang
ABSTRACT:
This dissertation examines the conditions under which entrepreneurial firms are most apt to
succeed. Besides grappling with the multiple strategic choices that they face, these firms also have to address
the institutional complexities in their environments. Together these three essays contribute to our understanding of
how the challenges associated with addressing these multi-faceted environmental conditions impact firm
outcomes.
The first study examines the process of entrepreneurial strategy making by analyzing the competitive
history of the Internet video industry in China. Leveraging a new hand-collected dataset that records activity by
all entrants into the Chinese Internet video industry from 2006-2011, this study documents how entrants who
adapted to a disadvantageous shift in the environment outperform those firms that chose a strategy that
did not require change; and how strategic commitments to user communities can serve as a complementary asset
to enhance the resilience of a start-up against disadvantageous shifts in their environment. The second essay
considers how the endogenous nature of appropriability impacts entrepreneurial strategy and performance. This
study focuses on the entrepreneur’s choice between investing their time and scarce resources in ensuring
appropriability versus investing in the execution and operation of their fledgling businesses. We investigate
these ideas empirically in the context of a unique sample of academic entrepreneurs: within a sample of
ventures that could have been developed by either faculty or students (or both), we find that faculty-led ventures
are much more closely associated with intellectual property, but are less agile in terms of their start-up and
commercialization activities. The third essay examines the impact of local institutional arrangements on firm-level
spillover effects from universities. Specifically, this study takes advantage of a major policy reform in China to
identify distinct university-influenced regions in order to test the proposition that the co-location of new ventures
with universities affects firm performance. Using a unique dataset from the National Bureau of Statistics of
China, this study provides early evidence suggesting that relative to domestic firms, foreign firms in these
university-influenced regions were more innovative. Furthermore, the performance discrepancy is most apparent
among smaller firms. This finding raises some substantial welfare implications about the efficiency of public
investments in universities when the benefits of such investments are offset by the localized institutional
arrangements.

DOCTORAL THESIS TITLE:

“Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production” by Benjamin Mako Hill (2013)
COMMITTEE:
Eric von Hippel, MIT Sloan (Chair); Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Arts and Sciences; Thomas Malone, MIT
Sloan; Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law
ABSTRACT:
Although some examples of Internet-based collaborative "peer production" — like Wikipedia and Linux
— build large volunteer communities and high-quality information goods, the vast majority of attempts at peer
production, like other forms of collective action, never even attract a second contributor. This dissertation is
composed of three essays that describe and test theories on the sources and dynamics of volunteer mobilization
in peer production.
The first essay is a qualitative analysis of seven attempts to create English-language online collaborative
encyclopedia projects started before January, 2001, when Wikipedia was launched. I offer a set of three
propositions for why Wikipedia, similar to previous efforts and a relatively late entrant, attracted a community of
hundreds of thousands while the other projects did not. Using data from interviews of these Wikipedia-like
projects' initiators, along with extensive archival data, I suggest that Wikipedia succeeded because its stated
goal hewed closely to a widely held concept of "encyclopedia" familiar to many potential contributors while the
project innovated around the process and the social organization of production.
In the second essay, I present evidence of a trade-off between "generativity" (i.e., qualities of work
products likely to attract follow-on contributors) and the originality of the derivative work products that follow.
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Using data from the Scratch online community — a large website where young people openly share and remix
animations and games, I build on foundational theoretical work in peer production to formulate and test a series
of hypotheses suggesting that the generativity of creative works is associated with moderate complexity,
prominent authors, and cumulativeness. I also formulate and test three hypotheses that these qualities are
associated with decreased originality in resulting derivatives. I find broad support for the hypothesized trade-off.
Finally, in the third essay, I consider the relationship between volunteer mobilization and governance in
peer production organizations. Although large successful peer production projects have inspired a wave of
social movements and scholars, I hypothesize that, like other democratic organizations, peer production exhibits
governance consistent with Robert Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy." Using exhaustive longitudinal data of
internal processes drawn from a population of wikis, I construct measures of organizational participation and
present evidence of increases in oligarchy and decreases in democracy associated with volunteer mobilization.
In contrast to previous work, I find support for Michel's iron law and conclude that the adoption of
organizational forms used in peer production may not enhance democratic outcomes.

DOCTORAL THESIS TITLE:

“Essays on the Production and Commercialization of New Scientific Knowledge” by
Michael Mikard (2013)
COMMITTEE:
Fiona Murray (Co-Chair), Scott Stern (Co-Chair), Ezra Zuckerman
ABSTRACT:
Scientific research frequently generates tremendous economic value. Yet, this value tends to be elusive
and public and private organizations often struggle to obtain returns from their investment in science. This
dissertation, composed of three essays, examines persistent challenges to the production and commercialization
of new scientific knowledge. The first essay of the dissertation describes simultaneous discoveries and their
potential as a research tool for social science. It also introduces the first systematic and automated method to
generate a list of such events. The resulting dataset of 578 recent simultaneous discoveries can be used to
investigate a number of questions, including the impact of the discovery environment, by using them to conduct
the first "twin studies" of new knowledge. As an example, the second essay investigates the relative impact of
universities and firms on science-based invention by examining 39 discoveries made simultaneously in academia
and in industry. As compared to universities, the results indicate that firms amplify the technological impact of
new scientific knowledge. The third essay of the dissertation, coauthored with Fiona Murray and Joshua Gans,
explores tradeoffs associated with collaboration in the production of new scientific knowledge. Specifically, we
find that collaboration is not only associated with higher-quality output, it is also associated with lower individual
productivity as well as challenges surrounding the allocation of credit. Taken together, the three essays examine
important challenges associated with the production and commercialization of new scientific knowledge-thus
providing insights about the drivers of economic value from public and private investment in science.