Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Organized by Nicholas Bloom, Serguey Braguinsky, Sabrina T. Howell, and Josh Lerner
Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
April 25, 2025
Royal Sonesta Hotel, 40 Edwin H. Land Blvd., Cambridge, MA (Parkview Room)
Meeting Format: 25 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for Q&A.

Friday, April 25

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

Foreign Political Risk and Technological Change

Joel P. Flynn, Yale University and NBER
Antoine B. Levy, University of California, Berkeley
Jacob Moscona, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Mai Wo, Yale University

9:40 am

Technology Spillovers, Diffusion and Rivalry in Firm Networks

Nuriye Melisa Bilgin, University of Turin
Ester Faia, Goethe University Frankfurt
Gianmarco Ottaviano, Bocconi University

10:20 am

Break

10:40 am

Firm Productivity and Learning with Digital Technologies: Evidence from Cloud Computing

James M. Brand, Microsoft
Mert Demirer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Connor Finucane, Microsoft
Avner A. Kreps, Northwestern University

11:20 am

Four 12-minute Egg-Timer Presentations:

11:22 am

Monopolizing Minds: How M&As Stifle Innovation Through Labor Market Power

Alex X. He, University of Maryland, College Park
Jing Xue, Georgia State University

11:24 am

From Labor to Intermediates: Firm Growth, Input Substitution, and Monopsony

Matthias Mertens, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Benjamin Schoefer, University of California, Berkeley and NBER

11:25 am

Productivity Beliefs and Efficiency in Science

Fabio Bertolotti, Banca d'Italia
Kyle R. Myers, Harvard University and NBER
Wei Yang Tham, University of Toronto

11:26 am

Capital Requirements and Entry into Entrepreneurship

Annika Bacher, BI Norwegian Business School
Andreas Fagereng, BI Norwegian Business School
Marius A. K. Ring, University of Texas at Austin
Ella Wold, BI Norwegian Business School

12:20 pm

Lunch - Somerset Room

1:30 pm

Technology Driven Market Concentration through Idea Allocation

Yueyuan Ma, University of California, Santa Barbara
Shaoshuang Yang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK–SZ)

2:10 pm

The Ms. Allocation of Talent

Petra Moser, New York University and NBER
Moritz Lubczyk, Rockwool Foundation Berlin

2:50 pm

Entrepreneur Experience and Success: Causal Evidence from Immigration Wait Lines

Abhinav Gupta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Franklin Qian, UNC Kenan - Flagler Business School
Yifan Sun, University of Pennsylvania

3:30 pm

Adjourn