I study innovation and technology adoption. My research examines how public policy, firm capabilities, and market access shape technological change and productivity. I build new datasets and use empirical and structural models to answer these questions.

My role. I conceived and led this study of Korea’s R&D push, including data construction, empirical and structural analyses, and writing. See how I transformed thousands of government research reports into a structured dataset ↗

We study how South Korea's first “mission-oriented” R&D program, implemented between 1992 and 2001, shaped innovation and economic outcomes. Using new textual data and a language model to identify targeted and control patent classes, we exploit the fact that some of the planned research projects were not implemented because of a budget shock. We use a local projections event study to compare the outcomes of targeted patent classes to those of control classes. Despite the absence of differential trends before the program, by ten years after the extension of program support, future-citation-weighed patenting output in the targeted classes doubled and real exports tripled relative to the control patent classes. These results stand when we compare targeted classes in South Korea to targeted classes in other countries, which we effectively use as placebos. Patent classes with less concentrated patenting output before the program drive our results. Using market-based patent valuations, we find that the program's benefits exceeded its costs by over a factor of three. Our findings suggest that technology policy was central to South Korea's transition to a knowledge-intensive economy.

My role. I lead the empirical analysis and contributed new data concepts from cheminformatics that measure how difficult it is to synthesize drugs in the lab (synthetic complexity) and reverse-engineer their chemical production process (retrosynthetic analysis). These two pieces of information allow us to have a hard measure of product difficulty and the overlap between new drugs’ production processes and a firm’s existing capacities. Generally not available to researchers, these measures allow us to answer novel questions in firm development.

When U.S. patents expire, complex medicines become widely available for production by generic laboratories. We study whether Indian pharmaceutical firms adopt these newly available products and what capabilities shape their entry. We link U.S. patent expiration dates to monthly sales by firm and drug, molecular structures, production process similarities, and measures of chemical complexity. This allows us to compare firm entry across products with different levels of therapeutic substitutability, production process overlap, and technical difficulty. We find that Indian generic laboratories adopt new products after U.S. patents expire, but entry depends on firms' market experience and chemical know-how. Patent expiration allows firms to branch out into novel products, but chemical complexity hampers this process.

My role. I conceived the study, led the data work, conducted the empirical and structural analyses, and wrote the paper.

We study the impact of the Panama Canal on the development of Canada's manufacturing sector from 1900 to 1939. Using newly digitized county-level data from the Census of Manufactures and a market-access approach, we exploit the plausibly exogenous nature of this historical episode to study how changes in transportation costs influence the process of structural transformation and manufacturing productivity. Our reduced-form estimates show that lowered shipping costs increased manufacturing employment as a share of the population by increasing the number of manufacturing establishments, though not their average size, capital intensity, or skilled labor share. Manufacturing revenues grew 9% more in counties with market access gains at the 75th percentile, compared to counties with 25th percentile gains. Productivity grew by 13% more. These effects persist when we consider general equilibrium effects: the closure of the Canal in 1939 would result in economic losses equivalent to 1.86% of GDP, chiefly as a by-product of the restriction of the country's access to international markets. Altogether, these results suggest that the Canal substantially altered the economic geography of the Western Hemisphere in the first half of the twentieth century.