Changes

Office: 617 588-1401 <br>

Fax: 617 868-2742 <br>

[[Media:EJEgan-AcademicCV-April2012.pdf|Academic Curriculum Vitae (pdf)]]

Ed's job market paper, ''How Start-up Firms Innovate'', proposes a `system vs. components' theory of innovation to understand the relationship between inventive activity and commercialization investment choices for patent-holding high-technology start-up firms. He tests the theory using cross-sectional analyses and a difference-in-difference analysis on near-population data of patent-holding start-up firms that secured either an initial public offering or an acquisition between 1986 and 2004. The theory requires that entrepreneurs maximize their expected profits given both the available technological opportunity and the state of technology in their industry. Start-up firms should specialize to pit their strengths against incumbents' weaknesses or generalize to best incumbents on every dimension. Moreover, policy that affects commercialization investment choices should also affect research and development choices, and vice versa. Ed shows that following the introduction of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which raised the costs of an initial public offering, start-up firms preferred to specialize in component-based invention rather than developing competitive systems.