Innovation Job Candidates 2025

Contact me if I have missed you. I will do my best to highlight these papers on @Afinetheorem during the job market season.

Note: This list focuses on candidates working on innovation, entrepreneurship, technology adoption, AI, and related topics in economics and management. Candidates are listed alphabetically by last name. Click the filter buttons to view candidates by category.
Candidate Research
Mohamad Adhami
Stanford
Quantifying Knowledge Spillovers Using Firm and Product Dynamics
Product exit + firm exit identify the wedge between private and social return of innovation → 16pp
(other growth papers)
Innovation
Manfredi Aliberti
EIEF
Beyond the Lab: The Effect of PhD Programs on Innovation
Local PhD programs opening in Italy → large increase in local patenting → highly cost-effective
(other papers on tech adoption)
Innovation
David Almog
Northwestern
Barriers to AI Adoption: Image Concerns at Work
When it is observable that I use AI, in a field experiment I use it less even though productivity falls
(many others papers look at Gen AI adoption and image/behavioral effects)
AI
Sara Benetti
University of British Columbia
The Social Consequences of Technological Change: Evidence from US Electrification and Immigrant Labor
Electrification increased social cohesion and workplace integration in early 20th c
Innovation
Aditya Bhandari
University of Chicago
Technology and the Geography of Industrial Policy
In UK data productivity is Hicks-Neutral mostly which means that there is a role for place-based policies
Innovation
Christine Blandhol
Princeton University
Curbing Tax Flight? Aggregate Effects of Taxing Entrepreneur Migration
Studies how a tax on migrating entrepreneurs impacts the economy, directly linking to entrepreneurship and policy
Entrepreneurship
John Bonney
Stanford University
How Network Hiring by Entrepreneurs Shapes Firm Formation and Performance
In Norwegian data startup that hire ex-coworkers of their founders grow much faster and model estimates show a quarter would not have been founded at all without access to these early high-quality coworkers
(other innovation and entrep papers)
Entrepreneurship
Justine Boudou
HBS
Not All That Glitters is Gold: Firm Hiring in the Market for Knowledge Workers
Academic productivity is only weakly correlated with productivity of scientists in industry and in fields where the link in weaker, industry hires are more likely to be laid off
(many other innovation papers)
Innovation
Raman Singh Chhina
Chicago
Startups and the State
Using Startup India, can bureaucrats identify good startups and hence direct capital better than uniform subsidies?
(plus other entrep papers)
Entrepreneurship
Manuela Collis
Toronto Rotman
Sexual Misconduct and Scientific Production
University sexual misconduct harms productivity of labs where it occurs, particularly after disclosure
Innovation
Pier Paolo Creanza
Princeton
Factories of Ideas? Big Business and the Golden Age of American Innovation
Mergers in early 20th c → big increase in innovation via research labs
(also has work on Italian returning scientists and JEH on Greek trade networks and "connectors")
Innovation
Benjamin Davies
Stanford
The Value of Conceptual Knowledge
Formalizes how beliefs about concepts (relationships between states) relates to signals (probability of states) and how this might matter for, e.g., AI-human task delegation
AI
Chris Esposito
UCLA
Global Science Sustains U.S. Innovation
In the "supply chain" of U.S. innovation, the citation path from NSF research to U.S. patents involves substantial foreign development
(many other innovation papers)
Innovation
Tianyu Fan
Yale
The Labor Market Incidence of New Technologies
Estimates how fields relate in "skill space" and how shocks from new innovation affect wages given the correlation between current job and ones you might move into
(other automation papers)
Innovation AI
Stephen Hobler
LSE
Worker Mobility and the Diffusion of Radical Technologies
Adoption of new tech hire in more rigid labor markets, but worker diffusion is how tech spreads so dynamically is really bad
Innovation
Ruru Hoong
MIT
Calibrated Coarsening: Designing Information for AI-Assisted Decisions
What is optimal provision of information to behavioral humans working with AI?
(many other AI papers)
AI
Brian Jabarian
Paris School of Economics
Voice AI in Firms
AI-led interviews are preferred by jobseekers, increase hire rates and decrease turnover
(many other AI papers)
AI
Furkan Kilic
Chicago
Spatial Allocation of Inventors, Knowledge Diffusion and Growth
Structural spatial model of citation links across industry → big US innovation hubs should be even bigger if you want to maximize growth
(many other innovation papers)
Innovation
Eric Klemm
University College London
Early Retirement, Capital Adjustment and Technology Adoption
Firms that lose older workers (due to a change in early retirement law in Germany) actually do worse at adopting new technology perhaps due to firm-specific integration challenges
Innovation
Yakup Kutsal Koca
USC
Labor Market Outcomes of AI Automation
In a structural labor model with AI diffusion, human specialists are more likely to face job losses
AI
Andrew Koh
MIT
Robust Technology Regulation
Adaptive sandboxes are the optimal mechanism for letting firms deploy potentially risky technologies
(many other AI papers)
AI
Xuelai LI
LBS
Venture Capital and Scientists’ Selection into Entrepreneurship
Shock to VC funding leads to a large increase in business formation for scientists working on "entrepreneurial" categories
(many other VC papers)
Entrepreneurship
Sijie Lin
Toronto
Learning to Prompt: Human Adaptation in Production with Generative AI
Humans adapt prompts to more quickly improve how new AI models work, based on data from MidJourney
(other AI papers)
AI
Yuchen Lin
Warwick
The U.S. Origins of Chinese Science
1970s reopening of Chinese science → schools with pre-52 US links send more grad students → those connections create similarities b/w US and Chinese physics at linked schools
Innovation
Yucheng Lu
NYU
Differential Impact of GenAI on Research Productivity: Evidence from ICLR
(also SimCity, a macrosimulation model based on LLMs that replicates data, and FIND, a database connecting NSF grants to many outcomes)
AI Innovation
Anna Lukianova
Wisconsin
State Income Taxation, Entrepreneurship, and Spatial Inequality in the U.S.
4.4% of entrepreneurial formation rates due to state-level business taxes
Entrepreneurship
Zach Luther
Vanderbilt
The Gravity of Patent Protection: Policy, Frictions, and Technology Diffusion
Free trade more effective that standardizing patent policy across nations in increasing gains to trade from innovation
(other papers on intl. patent families and unequal treatment of foreign patents)
Innovation
Jack Ma
Cornell
Extreme Heat and Directed Innovation
Places in Europe hit with extreme heat → more labor-saving innovation → mitigates some of productivity loss
Innovation
Roger Masclans
Duke
Science, Startups, and the Problem of Value Capture: Thin Acquisition Markets, Weak Outside Options
Deep tech startups capture a smaller share of value when acquired even though they create more value on average
(many other papers on science and innovation)
Entrepreneurship
Pablo Mileni Munari
Toulouse
Beyond Skills: Firms, Automation and Wage Inequality
Automation leads to gaps in firm productivity as well as to heterogeneity across worker types
Innovation
Rory Mullen
Warwick (AP)
Beyond Patent Ownership: Learning About Technological Usefulness
ML can help estimate the value of non-patented technology of firms
Innovation
Christina Nguyen
MIT Sloan
When Low Performance Takes Root: Deadwood and Delay at the U.S. Patent Office
Deadwood examiners at USPTO not only perform slowly but also lower productivity of folks in their same work group
(many other papers on innovation)
Innovation
Vishan Nigam
MIT
Specialization by Design: The Unequal Geographic Effects of Modular Product Design
Modular innovation in the auto industry creates economies of scope which lead to winner-take-all production even in an industry with substantial local differentiation in auto preference
Innovation
Koki Okumura
UCLA
Ownership Structure and Economic Growth
Increase in common ownership → more internalization of spillovers but less business-stealing → less overall growth empirically
(many other innovation and diffusion papers)
Innovation
Ana Oliveira
Utrecht
Till Automation Do Us Part: Firm Productivity and Worker Exit Following Technology Adoption
Adoption of automation technology in many cases reduces firm productivity and leads to exit of high-skill workers
Innovation
Kyeongmin Park
Rochester
Quality-driven Automation
Robot use linked to higher quality (price per unit) than rivals, and higher increase in quality after adoption
(also has paper on early AI adoption in Korea)
Innovation
Yinan Qiu
Princeton
Venture Capital Networks and Cross-Border Startup Knowledge Spillovers
VCs with foreign investments → more citations from the US to the patents of the foreign portfolio
Entrepreneurship
Eric Robertson
Virginia
Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation: Evidence from Malthusian Training in British Indian Bureaucracy
British bureaucrats trained under Malthus → less fiscal policy during droughts in their region in India
Innovation
Matteo Ruzzante
Northwestern
Price Regulation and the Adoption–Innovation Trade-off
Cotton seed price regulation in India increases adoption, dynamically harms because of decreased innovation
(Also worked with Sims on paper above)
Innovation
Alexander Sawyer
Penn
Learning through Sequential Interactions in the Market for Venture Capital
Structural model, VC (and to lesser extent entrepreneur) evaluation more valuable than learning while scaling for efficient capital allocation
Entrepreneurship
Anne Schaller
Vanderbilt
Competitive Effects of State Antitrust Laws: Evidence from the Progressive Era
State-level late 19th c antitrust laws did little to drive new entry or limit market power
Innovation
Jesse Silbert
Princeton
Making Talk Cheap: Generative AI and Labor Market Signaling
LLMs make it harder for applications to signal quality, and experimentally employers know this
AI
Chris Sims
Northwestern
The Origins of the Nitrogen Revolution
Guano in 19th c → nitrogen-deficient parts of UK produce more nitrogen-using crops → benefit lower for regions that trade heavily with nitrogen-heavy areas
(Also has papers on innovation in IR-era France from national exhibitions, and importance of rail vs telegraph for cointegrating prices across UK regions in 19th c)
Innovation
Lidia Smitkova
University of Oxford
Export Subsidies as Industrial Policy: the Case of the 19th Century Sugar Industry
1860s Austro-Hungarian sugar beet export subsidy did not improve welfare by letting firms hit optimal scale but instead increased misallocation and led to overproduction harming welfare
Innovation
Jiaming Soh
Michigan
Does Government Procurement Promote Small Business Growth?
Govt contracts for small construction → more growth later, partly for productivity upgrades rather than just liquidity constraints
Entrepreneurship
Songyuan Teng
Yale
Innovation Through Recombination
IO model in pharma sector of recombining known knowledge versus creating new knowledge and the ex-ante nonobvious implications of subsidies to both
(other papers on innovation)
Innovation
Hong-Yi TuYe
MIT Sloan
Rethinking Blitzscaling: Entrepreneurial Labor Impacts of Transformative AI
AI Entrepreneurship
Tasaneeya Viratyosin
Penn Wharton
Innovation Spillovers Along the Supply Chain
Structural model of innovation diffusion via supply chain relationship, estimated via R&D tax credit shocks among supply chain partners
(has another paper on diffusion)
Innovation
Hayley Wabiszewski
Wash U, postdoc Utah
Startup Acquisitions and Innovation in the Biopharmaceutical Industry
Structural model, dynamic, of pharma acquisitions, showing precisely where harmful acquisitions may occur given selection
Innovation Entrepreneurship
Xizhao Wang
Northwestern
Patenting and Information Disclosure
Using B-D Act, strategic obfuscation in patents when looking at description vs. summary
(many other papers on science policy)
Innovation
Qian Wang
Maryland
Innovation Path Choices in China's Electric Vehicle Battery Industry
IO model of innovation choice between two battery technologies showing substantial underprovision on the socially more valuable one though not mainly due to spillovers
Innovation
Yucheng Wong
Rochester
Venture Capital Contracts and Heterogeneous Innovation
In a dynamic structural model, VCs vs debt = much higher right tail outcomes even though few firms ever get VC
(lots of other VC and knowledge diffusion papers)
Entrepreneurship Innovation
Nicholas Wu
Yale
Solving Problems of Unknown Difficulty
Optimal exploration and principal-agent optimal exploration when both the difficulty and payoff of different outcomes is unknown
AI
Hongyuan Xia
Cornell
How Does Industry Shape Academic Science? Evidence from "Million Dollar Plants"
Million Dollar Plants lead to a shift in the direction of local science toward that relevant to the focal firm
(also has more traditional management/innovation papers)
Innovation
Zili Yang
USC
Technology M&A and Knowledge Diffusion
Acquisitions, using failed acquisitions as an instrument, increase citation in-industry of acquirer's patents
(also has paper on Tesla patent pledge - big jump in citations to Tesla patents from outside auto industry, esp batteries)
Innovation
Zhengyi Yu
USC
The Impacts of AI on Scientific Labor
AlphaFold2 leads to increased citations to structural biologists but especially already-leading ones who adopt it more quickly
AI Innovation
Qiyi Zhao
Stanford
Technological Change and the Market for Books, 1450-1550
Gutenberg print → shorter books and more trade in ideas → bigger effect than price of printing alone
Innovation
Fanwen Zhu
UCLA
Sanctions and Startups: Trade Shocks and Inventor Entrepreneurship in the U.S.-China Trade War
(also has work in progress on LLM adoption in orgs, inventor vs non-inventor founders)
Entrepreneurship
Jennifer Zou
Harvard
Dynamic Competition in Networked Markets: Evidence from US Broadband
Structural IO model of broadband rollout looking at options for increasing competition
Innovation
Kevin A. Bryan | University of Toronto | Job Market 2025