The Ties that Bind: Railroad Gauge Standards, Collusion, and Internal Trade in the 19th Century U.S.

Technology standards are pervasive in the modern economy, and a target for public and private investments, yet evidence on their economic importance is scarce. I study the conversion of 13,000 miles of railroad track in the U.S. South to standard gauge between May 31 and June 1, 1886 as a large-scale natural experiment in technology standards adoption that instantly integrated the South into the national transportation network. Using route-level freight traffic data, I find a large redistribution of traffic from steamships to railroads serving the same route that declines with route distance, with no change in prices and no evidence of effects on aggregate shipments, likely due to collusion by Southern carriers. Counterfactuals using estimates from a joint model of supply and demand for North-South freight transport suggest that if the cartel were broken, railroads would have passed through 50 percent of their cost savings from standardization, generating a 10 percent increase in trade on the sampled routes. The results demonstrate the economic value of technology standards and the potential benefits of compatibility in recent international treaties to establish transcontinental railway networks, while highlighting the mediating influence of product market competition on the public gains to standardization

Performance Feedback in Competitive Product Development

Performance feedback is ubiquitous in competitive settings where new products are developed. This paper introduces a fundamental tension between incentives and improvement in the provision of feedback. Using a sample of four thousand commercial logo design tournaments, I show that feedback reduces participation but improves the quality of subsequent submissions, with an ambiguous effect on high-quality output. To evaluate this tradeoff, I develop a procedure to estimate agents' effort costs and simulate counterfactuals under alternative feedback policies. The results suggest that feedback on net increases the number of high-quality ideas produced and is thus desirable for a principal seeking innovation

Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production

Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on individuals' creative production. Using a sample of commercial logo design competitions, and a novel, content-based measure of originality, I find that intensifying competition induces agents to produce original, untested ideas over tweaking their earlier work, but heavy competition drives them to stop investing altogether. The results yield lessons for the management of creative workers and for the implementation of competitive procurement mechanisms for innovation

Scale versus Scope in the Diffusion of New Technology

Using the farm tractor as a case study, I show that lags in technology diffusion arise along two distinct margins: scale and scope. Though tractors are now used in nearly every agricultural field operation and in the production of nearly all crops, they first developed with much more limited application, and early diffusion was accordingly limited in scope until tractor technology generalized. The results are consistent with theory and other historical examples, suggesting that the key to understanding technology diffusion lies not only in explaining the number of different users, but also in explaining the number of different uses

Factors Associated with Revision Surgery after Internal Fixation of Hip Fractures

Background: Femoral neck fractures are associated with high rates of revision surgery after management with internal fixation. Using data from the Fixation using Alternative Implants for the Treatment of Hip fractures (FAITH) trial evaluating methods of internal fixation in patients with femoral neck fractures, we investigated associations between baseline and surgical factors and the need for revision surgery to promote healing, relieve pain, treat infection or improve function over 24 months postsurgery. Additionally, we investigated factors associated with (1) hardware removal and (2) implant exchange from cancellous screws (CS) or sliding hip screw (SHS) to total hip arthroplasty, hemiarthroplasty, or another internal fixation device. Methods: We identified 15 potential factors a priori that may be associated with revision surgery, 7 with hardware removal, and 14 with implant exchange. We used multivariable Cox proportional hazards analyses in our investigation. Results: Factors associated with increased risk of revision surgery included: female sex, [hazard ratio (HR) 1.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.25-2.50; P = 0.001], higher body mass index (fo

Essays in Innovation, Past and Present

This dissertation studies the economics of historical and modern innovation. The first chapter makes inroads into understanding how competition and incentives shape the creative process which lies at the heart of all technological progress. The creative act is a classic example of a black box in academic research: we can see the inputs and outputs, but we know little about what happens in between. This paper uses new tools for measuring the content of digital media to see how commercial graphic designers’ work evolves in winner-take-all competition. In this chapter, I show that competition both creates and destroys incentives for innovation: some competition is necessary to motivate high-performers to experiment with novel, untested ideas over tweaking tried-and-true approaches, but heavy competition will drive them out of the market.In the second chapter, I study the effects of performance feedback on innovation in competitive settings. Feedback typically serves two functions: it informs agents of their relative performance, and it also helps them improve the quality of their product. The presence of these effects suggests a tradeoff between participation and improvement, as the revelation of asymmetries discourages effort. Using data from the same setting as chapter one, I first show that this tradeoff is real. I then develop a structural model of the setting -- the first of its kind in the literature -- and use the results to evaluate counterfactual feedback policies. The results suggest that feedback is on net a desirable mechanism for a principal seeking high-quality innovation.In the third chapter, I use the farm tractor as a case study to demonstrate that technologies diffuse along two distinct margins: scale and scope. Although tractors are now used in nearly every field operation and with nearly all crops, early models were far more limited in their capabilities, and only in the late 1920s did the technology begin to generalize for broader use with row crops such as corn. Diffusion prior to 1930 was accordingly heavily concentrated in the Wheat Belt, while growth in diffusion from 1930-1940 was concentrated in the Corn Belt. Other historically important innovations in agriculture and manufacturing share similar histories of expanding scope. The key to understanding the pace and path of technology diffusion is thus not only in explaining the number of different users, but also in explaining the number of different uses.A common theme across all three chapters is the focus on developing tools or strategies to study innovation that are less dependent on patent data than the extant literature, since the majority of innovation is not patented (and often not patentable), and doing so while advancing the empirical literature on innovation in new directions