Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, S. Abraham Ravid, and Olav Sorenson
An introduction to a special issue in which members of the Mallen Conference analyzed ways in which digitalization had changed the business of filmed entertainment, from production to distribution to the introduction of streaming platforms.
Journal of Cultural Economics, 45: 157-170 (OPEN ACCESS)
Ramana Nanda, Sampsa Samila, and Olav Sorenson
We use investment-level data to study performance persistence in venture capital (VC). Consistent with prior studies, we find that each additional IPO among a VC firm’s first ten investments predicts as much as an 8.5% higher IPO rate on its subsequent investments, though this effect erodes with time. In exploring its sources, we document several additional facts: successful outcomes stem in large part from investing in the right places at the right times; VC firms do not persist in their ability to choose the right places and times; but early success does lead to investing more in later rounds and in larger syndicates. This pattern of results seems most consistent with the idea that initial success improves access to deal flow. That preferential access raises the quality of subsequent investments, perpetuating performance differences in initial investments.
Journal of Financial Economics, 137(2020): 231-248 (OPEN ACCESS)
Summarized on Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance
Marc J. Lerchenmueller, Olav Sorenson, and Anupam B. Jena
OBJECTIVES
Women remain underrepresented on faculties of medicine and the life sciences more broadly. Whether gender differences in self presentation of clinical research exist and may contribute to this gender gap has been challenging to explore empirically. The objective of this study was to analyze whether men and women differ in how positively they frame their research findings and to analyze whether the positive framing of research is associated with higher downstream citations.
DESIGN
Retrospective observational study.
DATA SOURCES
Titles and abstracts from 101 720 clinical research articles and approximately 6.2 million general life science articles indexed in PubMed and published between 2002 and 2017.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Analysis of article titles and abstracts to determine whether men and women differ in how positively they present their research through use of terms such as “novel” or “excellent.” For a set of 25 positive terms, we estimated the relative probability of positive framing as a function of the gender composition of the first and last authors, adjusting for scientific journal, year of publication, journal impact, and scientific field.
RESULTS
Articles in which both the first and last author were women used at least one of the 25 positive terms in 10.9% of titles or abstracts versus 12.2% for articles involving a male first or last author, corresponding to
a 12.3% relative difference (95% CI 5.7% to 18.9%). Gender differences in positive presentation were greatest in high impact clinical journals (impact
factor >10), in which women were 21.4% less likely to present research positively. Across all clinical journals, positive presentation was associated with 9.4% (6.6% to 12.2%) higher subsequent citations, and in high impact clinical journals 13.0% (9.5% to 16.5%) higher citations. Results were similar when broadened to general life science articles published in journals indexed by PubMed, suggesting that gender differences in positive word use generalize to broader samples.
CONCLUSIONS
Clinical articles involving a male first or last author were more likely to present research findings positively in titles and abstracts compared with articles in which both the first and last author were women, particularly in the highest impact journals. Positive presentation of research findings was associated with higher downstream citations.
British Medical Journal, 367(2019):I6573 (OPEN ACCESS)
M. Diane Burton, Michael S. Dahl, and Olav Sorenson
We analyzed Danish registry data from 1991 to 2006 to determine how firm age and size influence wages. Unadjusted statistics suggest that smaller firms paid less than larger ones and that firm age had little or no bearing on wages. After adjusting for differences in the characteristics of employees hired by these firms, however, we observed both firm age and firm size effects. We found that larger firms paid more than smaller firms for observationally-equivalent individuals but, contrary to conventional wisdom, that younger firms paid more than older firms. The size effect, however, dominates the age effect. Thus, while the typical startup – being both young and small – paid less than a more established employer, the largest ones paid a wage premium.
Print version of Prize Lecture for the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, 2018
Olav Sorenson
Social relationships play at least three important roles in entrepreneurship. They help to determine who sees entrepreneurship as an available and desirable career path. Entrepreneurs use their contacts to raise funds for and to recruit employees and partners to their ventures. Social relationships also influence where and when entrepreneurs want to spend their leisure time. Because of these factors, entrepreneurs tend to found their firms in the places that they live (and in the industries in which they have been employed). That, in turn, implies that industries will tend to become and remain concentrated in a small number of places, even when firms do not benefit from this clustering.
Small Business Economics, 51 (2018): 527-537 (OPEN ACCESS)
Marc Lerchenmueller and Olav Sorenson
We examined the extent to which and why early career transitions have led to women being underrepresented among faculty in the life sciences. We followed the careers of 6,336 scientists from the post-doctoral fellowship stage to becoming a principal investigator (PI) – a critical transition in the academic life sciences. Using a unique dataset that connects individuals’ National Institutes of Health funding histories to their publication records, we found that a large portion of the overall gender gap in the life sciences emerges from this transition. Women transition to being a PI at a 20% lower rate than men. Differences in “productivity” (publication records) can explain about 60% of this lower rate. The remaining differential in the rates appears to stem from gender differences in the returns to similar publication records, with women systematically receiving less credit for highly-cited research.
Research Policy, 47 (2018): 1007-1017 (OPEN ACCESS)
Kyle Jensen, Balázs Kovács, and Olav Sorenson
An examination of the prosecution and maintenance histories of approximately 2.7 million US patent applications indicates that women have less favorable outcomes than men.
Olav Sorenson
Social relationships channel information, influence, and access to scarce resources. As a consequence, social networks—-the patterns of these relationships across the members of a community—-influence who comes up with important innovations, whether and how rapidly those innovations get adopted, and who has the ability to commercialize them. They therefore also affect the overall rate at which innovation occurs in the economy. This paper provides an introduction to and review of the research on social networks most relevant to innovation, with a particular focus on the earliest stages of the innovation process. It then discusses the likely consequences of a variety of policy interventions that could either reduce the importance of social relationships to innovation or alter the patterns of relationships in ways that might promote innovation.
Carolin Lerchenmüller, Marc Lerchenmueller, and Olav Sorenson
This study examines gender differences in the relative rates of men versus of women being listed in the prestigious first and last author positions on papers, changes in those rates over time, and differences in those rates across groups of articles. The probability of a woman being the first author on an article has risen over time to the point where she has better odds than a man of earning that position. But this advantage only exists for articles in less prominent journals. Women still have lower odds of receiving first authorships in the most prestigious journals. Progress in the rates at which women appear in the last author position, moreover, appears to have stalled, with women being named to these positions at nearly half the rate of men.
Circulation,137 (2018): 880-882 (OPEN ACCESS)
Valentina Assenova and Olav Sorenson
Entrepreneurs in many emerging economies start their firm informally, without registering with the state. We examine how informality at the time of founding affected the growth and performance of 12,146 firms in 18 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings indicate that entrepreneurs who registered their firms at founding enjoyed greater success, in terms of sales and employment. But these benefits varied widely across countries. Countries in which people perceive the government as being less corrupt, those in which they have greater trust in the courts, and those with lower levels of ethnic conflict had larger performance benefits associated with being formal. The benefits of firm formalization therefore appear to depend on the socio-political legitimacy of the state.
Organization Science, 28 (2017): 804-818 (OPEN ACCESS)