Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
19 results
Search Results
Item THE ROLE OF SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS IN INVENTIONS AND THEIR ALLOCATION: EVIDENCE FROM JAPAN’S INDUSTRIALIZATION(2024) Yamaguchi, Shotaro; Braguinsky, Serguey; Agarwal, Rajshree; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation seeks to address the role of university-educated scientists and engineers (S&Es) during industrialization, with a particular focus on the sorting of S&Es into invention activities and their allocation process both within and across firms. To achieve this, I delve deeply into the historical context of Japan's industrialization from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a period marked by the simultaneous emergence of multiple heavy manufacturing industries, a higher education system in science and engineering, and the rise of extensively diversified conglomerates known as zaibatsu. Using a manually constructed individual career database encompassing nearly all Japanese university graduates in science and engineering from the cohorts of 1877 to 1920 as an empirical basis, I conduct three independent yet interconnected studies in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I investigate the factors influencing the sorting of university-educated scientists and engineers (S&Es) into inventors by matching them with archival patent records. I find a strong positive correlation between academic excellence and the likelihood of becoming an inventor as well as invention productivity. These highly skilled individuals significantly contributed to inventions in fields associated with emerging heavy manufacturing industries. I also underscore a strong complementarity between their academic skills and post-graduation job experience, which synergistically facilitated the generation of inventions. In Chapter 2, I delve deeply into the (re-)allocation process of educated plant managers and engineers across establishments within a leading cotton-spinning firm, in conjunction with investment in physical capital. Through detailed analysis of plant-level data on human capital appointments, transfers, and capital investments, I illuminate the endogenous process of internal human capital (re-)allocations in alignment with evolving strategic priorities. Notably, the shift from cost leadership to product differentiation, driven by high-end spinning machines, engendered a three-way complementarity between managerial human capital, engineering human capital, and advanced technologies. In Chapter 3, I examine how S&E university graduates are allocated both externally (moves across different independent firms) and internally (moves across affiliated firms within diversified firms or conglomerates) and their implication for innovation. I demonstrate that internal mobility enhances individual invention performance, whereas external mobility diminishes it. However, these performance differences are primarily attributed to the selection of different quality of human capital. Additional analysis suggests that high-quality human capital tends to enter growing industries through internal mobility and be often placed in managerial positions that grant them to access complementary resources. Overall, my dissertation studies contribute to the literature on strategic human capital, corporate strategy, and economic emergence. I assert that the insights derived from the unique historical context of Japan’s industrialization can not only be applied to current emerging economies but also to new industries in developed countries wherein the supply of specialized talent is scarce and mega firms play a pivotal role in driving innovation.Item THE “PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHERS”: HOW JOURNALISM EDUCATORS ARE INNOVATING AND COLLABORATING IN RESPONSE TO THE NEWS CRISIS(2023) Burns, Mary Alison; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the motives, experiences, and perspectives of journalism faculty members at colleges and universities who have invented, developed, and led innovative experiential learning collaborations in their programs. Through qualitative interviews and constructivist grounded theory, this study finds that journalism educators are launching specific types of collaborative projects in response to ongoing and emerging problems in journalism. This dissertation offers a typology of ideal-type j-school collaborations, and a new conceptualization of collaboration as a strategy for democratic stewarding in journalism education.Item ESSAYS ON INNOVATION, HUMAN CAPITAL, AND SMALL BUSINESSES(2023) Xue, Jing; Maksimovic, Vojislav; Yang, Liu; Business and Management: Finance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation comprises three essays that explore how human and social capital influence innovation and promote firm dynamism, particularly for small businesses. It studies how firms' uptake of projects is shaped by the local environments, such as superstar firms, talent clusters, and local social capital. In the first essay, I study the labor channel underlying the agglomeration of innovation activity. It identifies the reallocation of human capital as a key channel of agglomeration spillovers for innovative firms. To measure agglomeration spillovers, I study how R&D labs in different local labor markets respond differently to scientific breakthroughs, which create large and unexpected shocks to innovation productivity in certain technology categories. I document four main findings. i), following scientific breakthroughs, affected labs in thicker local labor markets (i.e., commuting zones with more inventors innovating in a certain field) produce more patents and higher-quality patents, consistent with positive agglomeration spillovers. ii), the increase in patenting is mostly attributed to new hires rather than incumbent inventors. iii), the thick labor market effect is concentrated in states and industries where there is lower enforceability of non-compete agreements and labor is more mobile. iv), using textual analysis to identify lab-level exposure to scientific breakthroughs, I find that inventors are reallocated to labs that are more favorably affected by shocks, which helps labs in thicker labor markets to more easily bring in inventors working in the same niche fields and having a diverse knowledge base. Taken together, these results point to labor mobility as a key force in explaining why innovative firms cluster and suggest that the clustering of firms in thick labor markets can foster corporate innovation by facilitating the productivity-enhancing reallocation of human capital following scientific breakthroughs. In the second essay, I identify the entry effects of top innovative firms on incumbent innovation. I exploit the inter-temporal variation in patenting activities of local inventors in chosen commuting zones that attracted the firm headquarters and in runner-up commuting zones that were finalists of location choice. Treated and control groups have similar trends prior to the entry, while the local inventors in the chosen zones apply 6.7% more patents, gain 16.8% more top patents, and receive 11.6% more citations. Entry effects are stronger among local inventors who are technologically or socially closer to the entering firm, after controlling for innovation incentives and labor mobility. Social closeness, isolated from technological proximity, consistently explains the innovation gains, which suggests knowledge diffusion is the important channel for local innovation productivity spillovers. In the third essay, we investigate why small businesses exploit business opportunities better in some areas than others. In a sample of 1.2 million consumer-facing establishments, social capital predicts the uptake of risk-free loans controlling for close-by bank branches, income, and education. One standard deviation increase in the social capital metric accounts for 20 percent of the variation in uptake across zip codes, surpassing the impact of a bank branch within 1000 yards. Strong social capital benefits large, low-growth stores in less-dynamic areas, whereas bank branches benefit small, high-growth stores in more-dynamic areas. Virtual connections have the greatest effect on uptake in already advantaged locations.Item Essays on Entrepreneurship: The Role of Complexity of Innovation and Efficient Hierarchies(2023) Ding, Yuheng; Braguinsky, Serguey; Agarwal, Rajshree; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Entrepreneurial activities have been on the decline across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. during the past few decades. This decline (sometimes also called “declining business dynamism”) is reflected in the decreasing rate of new firm entry, the share of young firms (usually defined as those five years of age or less) in the total number of firms and/or the share of employment at young firms in total employment, and so on (e.g., Decker et al. 2014; Akcigit and Ates, 2021). All of the above have exhibited a secular decline, not just in the U.S. but in other advanced economies as well. The underlying causes of these trends, however, are not yet clear with a broad array of explanations suggested in the literature (Akcigit and Ates, 2019; 2021; Decker et al., 2016; Hopenhayn et al., 2018; Karahan et al., 2019; Andrews et al., 2016). There also appears to be a lot of heterogeneity in how strongly the decline in entrepreneurial activities (business dynamism) is pronounced in various industries and sectors of the economy. In particular, the evidence in Haltiwanger et al. (2014) suggests that high-tech industries could be affected more than other sectors of the economy. High-tech sectors have been the driving force of growth in recent decades, so uncovering the reasons for declining business dynamism in those sectors is a task of first-order importance. In the first chapter, I employ the restricted-use data on the science and engineering workforce in the U.S. to investigate whether the increasing burden of knowledge is a growing concern for science-based entrepreneurship. Results show that since 1997, the rate of startup formation has precipitously declined for firms operated by U.S. Ph.D. recipients in science and engineering. The decline in startup formation is accompanied by an earnings decline, increasing work complexity in R&D, and more administrative work for science-based founders. With limited access to efficient knowledge hierarchies, founders of science-based startups must shoulder the burden of knowledge by doing more tasks by themselves. Workers at established firms, on the other hand, could better mitigate the burden of knowledge by narrowing the span of control and increasing the depth of hierarchy. Moreover, less experienced founders were hit harder than more experienced founders as the increasing burden of knowledge led to increasing returns to labor experience. While in the first chapter I use individual-level work data, in the second chapter I utilize firm-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau to develop the analysis further. I adopt the abductive approach and leverage matched employee-employer Census data between 2000-2014 to investigate how a growing burden of knowledge (measured as knowledge interdependence) in the most innovative firms affects potential entrepreneurs’ decisions to start their own business ventures. I show that higher knowledge interdependence in incumbent firms is negatively associated with employee entrepreneurship, and the negative effect is pronounced even stronger among the highest-performing employees. Moreover, higher knowledge interdependence has a positive selection effect on the quality of “spinouts”, and this effect is significantly stronger if the startup is formed by individuals ranked highest in the human capital distribution. These results suggest that knowledge interdependence does not merely raise the barrier for entry into entrepreneurship by imposing higher costs of knowledge transfer. It also changes the functioning of the internal labor market inside the firms. In the third chapter, I further investigate the mechanism underlying the relationship between knowledge interdependence and employee entrepreneurship. I propose a formal theoretical framework that reconciles all empirical findings. The theory suggests firms that rely on higher knowledge interdependence should share “rent” with their employees by paying wage premia if the profit from higher knowledge interdependence is high enough. As a result, within-firm earning dispersion would always be larger in firms relying on higher knowledge interdependence. I find supporting evidence in the data for this alternative explanation. Overall, these findings have important implications for declining entrepreneurial activity, rising income inequality, and technological change in the U.S. economy. While the conventional wisdom might view the declining entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. as the demise of economic growth, it is possible that as innovation becomes more complex, large established firms start to substitute the role of start-ups in pushing forward the technological frontier and driving economic growth as the efficient knowledge hierarchy could better deal with complex knowledge needed in the production process (Garicano, 2000; Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg, 2004). If this is the case, the declining business dynamism might just be a reflection of technological change and efficient (re)allocation of resources but not necessarily detrimental to technological advancement and economic growth. Whether this is true remains an avenue for future research.Item THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REGIMES ON TIME-BASED DEFENSE INNOVATION(2021) Greenwalt, William Charles; Joyce, Philip G; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Time was a significant factor in shaping disruptive defense innovation solutions in World War II and the early Cold War. During this period, significant advances were made in military aircraft, missiles, submarines, electronics, and other technologies that were achieved through a time-based development approach of rapid experimentation and operational prototyping. Since the 1960s, however, the time taken to develop and deploy U.S. military systems has significantly increased. This increase corresponded to a shift in emphasis within the public management regimes established to govern defense innovation to one of predominately controlling cost. A systems analysis approach to defense management gained prominence during the Kennedy Administration and emphasized cost analysis, program budgeting, and centralized planning and control from within the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a means to obtain greater efficiency in defense spending. This framework was implemented through a series of linear processes overseen by compartmented management regimes such as the requirements, budget, acquisition, and contracting functions in a structure institutionalized in law and regulation. These linear processes evolved in a way that increased the minimum time to conduct defense innovation that far exceeded previous developmental timelines. Compounding the problem of linearity, government-unique processes and requirements within defense management regimes have created barriers to the civil-military integration of the industrial base. This has furthered the establishment of a narrow, specialized defense industrial base by excluding from the defense market those commercial companies that innovate quickly within time-based constraints. While periodic end-rounds to management regimes were created when the Department needed to rapidly innovate in an emergency or to access innovation from the larger commercial market, these efforts have been at the margins of expenditures and were eventually constrained by the traditional management regimes. A broader ability to reduce innovation times or expand the defense industrial base will require systematic change to address process linearity and civil-military integration barriers.Item Essays on Innovation, Firm Dynamics, and Productivity Growth(2020) Zhao, Yi; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States has been experiencing a secular decline in the pace of business formation and young firm activity shares in recent decades. U.S. productivity growth also slowed down during the same period. This thesis studies two questions. First, what are the driving forces and long-term growth implications of the observed trends? Second, how is the creative destruction process translated into the measured cost of living?Using a longitudinal worker-firm matched dataset from the U.S. Census Bureau, I document that in the innovation intensive high-tech sector, the decline in young firm activity shares is accompanied by: 1) a decline in the growth rate of the demand for skills, and 2) a flattening of the life cycle of skilled labor accumulation of high-tech firms. By developing an innovation-based firm dynamics model that is consistent with the micro-level skilled labor accumulation over the firm life cycle, I show that rising frictions in skilled labor adjustment can explain the joint evolution of young firm employment shares and demand for skills. These frictions influence productivity growth through affecting the stock of human capital firms possess. A calibrated model shows that a rise in skilled labor adjustment costs lowers productivity growth by 75 basis points in the high-tech sector. A rise in entry costs, on the other hand, is not likely the main driver for declining young firm activities, as it implies an increase in demand for skills. Finally, productivity gain (loss) from reallocation can be offset by the general equilibrium effects of reallocation on aggregate demand for skills. The impact of innovation on welfare depends critically on taking into account the impact of innovation on the cost of living. Building upon the framework of Redding and Weinstein (2020), I estimate the exact cost of living in the U.S. consumer goods sector using the Nielsen Retail Scanner data over the period of 2006 to 2015. The estimated inflation rate considering product turnover and taste shocks is one percent lower than the tradition CPI measure. Furthermore, I show that the direction of the bias in traditional price indices is determined by the correlation between the initial period market share of products and relative taste shocks. Finally, the exact price index based on a nested CES demand structure can be used to study the contribution to the cost of living by firms of difference sizes.Item An Autoethnographic Account of Innovation at the US Department of Veterans Affairs(2020) Casertano, Andrew E; Marciano, Richard; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The history of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health information technology (HIT) has been characterized by both enormous successes and catastrophic failures. While the VA was once hailed as the way to the future of twenty-first-century health care, many programs have been mismanaged, delayed, or flawed, resulting in the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Since 2015 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has designated HIT at the VA as being susceptible to waste, fraud, and mismanagement. The timely central research question I ask in this study is, can healthcare IT at the VA be healed? To address this question, I investigate a HIT case study at the VA Center of Innovation (VACI), originally designed to be the flagship initiative of the open government transformation at the VA. The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) was designed to promote the open innovation ecosystem public-private-academic partnership. Based on my fifteen years of experience at the VA, I use an autoethnographic methodology to make a significant value-added contribution to understanding and modeling the VA’s approach to innovation. I use several theoretical information system framework models including People, Process, and Technology (PPT), Technology, Organization and Environment (TOE), and Technology Adaptive Model (TAM) and propose a new adaptive theory to understand the inability of VA HIT to innovate. From the perspective of people and culture, I study retaliation against whistleblowers, organization behavioral integrity, and lack of transparency in communications. I examine the VA processes, including the different software development methodologies used, the development and operations process (DevOps) of an open-source application developed at VACI, the Radiology Protocol Tool Recorder (RAPTOR), a Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) radiology workflow module. I find that the VA has chosen to migrate away from inhouse application software and buy commercial software. The impact of these People, Process, and Technology findings are representative of larger systemic failings and are appropriate examples to illustrate systemic issues associated with IT innovation at the VA. This autoethnographic account builds on first-hand project experience and literature-based insights.Item Finance and Productivity(2019) Sever, Can; Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Financial crises are associated with large and persistent output losses, pointing to productivity losses. A potential channel for this phenomenon is the negative impact of disruptions in financial markets on innovative activity, since innovation is the key driver of productivity and economic growth. Throughout three chapters of my dissertation, I provide evidence for this channel. Using data from advanced, emerging market and European economies, following different financial crisis episodes, I show that financial crises lead to a persistent decline, not only in the economic output, but also in innovation. The findings in this dissertation have implciations for macroeconomic policies such as monetary and fiscal policies, structrucal reforms, crisis prevention policies and policies that can shelter productive investment projects from financial frictions.Item Essays on Firm Financing, Investment, and Growth(2019) Penciakova, Veronika; Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies the relationship between firm financing, investment, and growth. Chapter 1 makes use of a unique dataset that combines ownership data, Census Bureau data, and patenting data to study whether firms held by owners with more diversified business interests engage in more growth-enhancing risky innovation. I document that higher owner diversification leads to riskier innovation, after taking into account firm life cycle characteristics, access to finance, other features of ownership structure, and inherent firm and owner characteristics. I also provide evidence that diversification matters at the sector level, with sectors characterized by higher diversification exhibiting higher risky innovation, revenue, volatility, and growth. I present a stylized model that rationalizes these empirical findings. Chapter 2 studies the financial leverage of U.S. firms over their life-cycle and the implications of leverage for firm growth and response to shocks using a new dataset that combines private firms' balance sheets with Census Bureau data. We show that firm age and size are good predictors of leverage for private firms but not for publicly-listed ones. Using the Great Recession as a shock to financial conditions, we show that during the Great Recession leverage declines for private, but not public firms. We also provide evidence that private firms' growth is positively associated with leverage, while public firms' growth is not. Chapter 3 explores the extent to which interest rate fluctuations during sudden stops contribute to resource misallocation and explain the sharp decline in productivity observed during these episodes. Using firm-level data from Chile, I show evidence of rising misallocation during the 1998 sudden stop and evidence of hiring and investment frictions that could trigger this rising dispersion and subsequent decline in productivity. I then study the contribution of interest rate level and volatility shocks to this rise in misallocation using a small open economy model featuring heterogeneous firms that are subject to non-convex capital and labor adjustment frictions and calibrated using firm-level data from Chile. The model is qualitatively consistent with the rise in dispersion of marginal products and the decline in productivity observed during the sudden stop crisis.Item Do industrial clusters encourage establishment innovation?(2018) Fang, Li; Knaap, Gerrit; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Industrial clusters are geographical concentrations of related industries. They foster innovation, job creation and business formation. Previous studies find that firms in clusters on average are more innovative than firms outside. They interpret this as evidence that clusters encourage firms to innovate. This interpretation is misleading because two different mechanisms can lead to the same result. On the one hand, firms in clusters improve innovativeness through knowledge spillovers and network building. On the other, less innovative firms are forced out of clusters by tough competition. Most studies fail to differentiate these two mechanisms. I separate these mechanisms and examine their variations across industries and establishments. I also search for the optimal spatial scale of industrial clusters to maximize their effect on innovation. In this dissertation, I match establishment data with patent data for the state of Maryland from 2004 to 2013. I improve the methodology of quantifying the causal relationship between clusters and innovation, and apply this method to employment centers. Employment centers on average encourage establishments to file for 8% to 11% more patents. This effect is maximized within a one- to two-mile radius region. I also compare how much clusters encourage innovation across different industries, and find significant heterogeneity. In Metalworking Technology, the effect of clusters peaks at a three-mile radius region and increases patent applications by 18%. In contrast, in Business Services, the effect is essentially zero, even when it is maximized in a one-mile radius region. These differences can be explained by industrial characteristics, such as the different level of reliance on tacit knowledge. Finally, I examine how industrial clusters shape the originality of small versus large establishments. I find that small in-cluster establishments improve innovation numerically more than large establishments, but their differences are statistically insignificant. This dissertation can provide guidance to the design of industrial policies. It helps to more precisely evaluate the benefit of cluster policies. Policymakers can also implement cluster policies targeting at the most beneficiary industries and the optimal spatial scales.