Category: Research

• March 3, 2019

  Prior social ties and the limits of peer effects on startup team performance’

  Strategic Management Journal 40(9) (with Rembrand Koning) We conduct a field experiment at an entrepreneurship bootcamp to investigate whether interaction with proximate peers shapes a nascent startup team’s performance. We find that teams whose members lack prior ties to others at the bootcamp experience peer effects that influence the quality of their product prototypes. A…
• January 1, 2019

  Digitization and Divergence: School Ratings and Segregation in America

  Working Paper (November, 2018) (with Anuj Kumar) We analyze whether widespread online access to school quality information affected economic and social segregation in America. We leverage the staged roll-out of GreatSchools.org school ratings across America from 2006-2015 to answer this question. Across a range of outcomes and specifications, we find that the mass availability of…
• September 22, 2018

  Conversations and idea generation: Evidence from a field experiment

  Research Policy, 48(9) (with Rembrand Koning) When do conversations lead people to generate better ideas? We conducted a field experiment at a startup bootcamp to evaluate the impact of informal conversations on the quality of product ideas generated by participants. Specifically, we examine how the personality of an innovator (openness to experience, capturing creativity) and…
• September 22, 2018

  Helpful behavior and the durability of collaborative ties

  Organization Science (with Sampsa Samila and Alexander Oettl) Long-term collaborations are crucial in many creative domains. Although there is ample research on why people collaborate, our knowledge about what drives some collaborations to persist and others to decay is still emerging. In this paper, we extend theory on third-party effects and collaborative persistence to study…
• September 22, 2018

  When does advice impact startup performance?

  Strategic Management Journal, 40(3), 331-356 (with Aaron Chatterji, Solene Delecourt and Rembrand Koning) Why do some entrepreneurs thrive while others fail? We explore whether the advice entrepreneurs receive about managing their employees influences their startup’s performance. We conducted a randomized field experiment in India with 100 high-growth technology firms whose founders received in-person advice from…
• September 22, 2018

  Social networks and careers

  “Social_Networks_and_Careers“, in Social Networks at Work, D.J. Brass and S.P. Borgatti (eds.) S.I.O.P. Frontiers Book Series. Social networks affect a range of career outcomes including job search, promotion and wage determination. Networks also affect major career transitions, including entry into entrepreneurship and exit into retirement. Across a range of studies, individuals are found to use…
• September 22, 2018

  Peers and network growth: Evidence from a natural experiment

  Management Science, 61(10), 2536-2547. (with Surendrakumar Bagde) Much research suggests that social networks affect individual and organizational success. However, a strong assumption underlying this research is that network structure is not reducible to the individual attributes of social actors. In this article, we test this assumption by examining whether interacting with random peers causes exogenous growth…
• September 22, 2018

  The lives and deaths of jobs: Technical interdependence and survival in a job structure

  Organization Science, 26(6), 1665-1681 (with John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning) Prior work has considered the properties of individual jobs that make them more or less likely to survive in organizations. Yet little research examines how a job’s position within a larger job structure affects its life chances and thus the evolution of the larger job structure over time.…
• September 22, 2018

  The mechanics of social capital and academic performance in an Indian college

  American Sociological Review, 78(6), 1009-1032. (with Surendrakumar Bagde) In this article we examine how social capital affects the creation of human capital. Specifically, we study how college students’ peers affect academic performance. Building on existing research, we consider the different types of peers in the academic context and the various mechanisms through which peers affect performance.…
• September 22, 2018

  Group based trajectories of network formation and dynamics

  Social Networks, 34(4), 506-514. In this paper, we propose the application of a semi-parametric statistical methodology called Group-Based Developmental Trajectory Analysis to studying the dynamics of social networks. We begin with a discussion of theoretical problems in network analysis that may benefit from this approach. Next, we describe the methodology and how it can be applied…