Background
I am an Assistant Professor in the Management Department at Lehigh University’s College of Business. I also hold an appointment as an Economist at the U.S. Patent Office (Office of the Chief Economist).
I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 2021. Prior to beginning graduate school, I worked as a political appointee in the Office of Economic Policy at the Department of Treasury under President Obama. I received my B.A. from Wellesley College, where I majored in English and Economics.
Interests
My research lies at the nexus of innovation and representation. In my work, I quantify the magnitude of gender and resource inequality in innovation contexts and identify the mechanisms by which these arise, along with opportunities for interventions to reduce performance gaps. I use empirical tools and quantitative analysis to explore the dynamics of representation in a variety of settings, including the U.S. patent application system, scientific research, and digital platforms.
Why does this matter? If women and minorities are underrepresented in innovation, their talents are underutilized and the inventions that they may have developed are lost. This has negative implications for the progress of innovation more broadly as well as distributional consequences. If some types of individuals are less likely to participate in innovation, their populations may suffer particularly acutely both because innovation is less likely to serve their needs as well as because they fail to receive the career benefits of being involved in innovation.
You can learn more about my work on this podcast, or in these articles.
Selected Research
Attrition and the Gender Patenting Gap (with Abhay Aneja and Oren Reshef). Accepted at the Review of Economics and Statistics
Women are underrepresented in patenting. In this study, we consider differential responsiveness to rejection as a contributor to the gender gap in invention. Leveraging the prosecution histories of almost one million U.S. patent applications and the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners, we show that women are 3.7-6.9 percentage points less likely to continue in the application process following an early-stage rejection. Conditional on applying for a patent, male-female disparities in the propensity to abandon applications account for more than half of the overall gender gap in issued patents. We provide suggestive evidence that institutional support can help reduce the attrition gap.Media Coverage: Marginal Revolution, Lehigh News, Diversity Pilots Initiative, WashU Newsroom
Getting on the Map: The Impact of Online Listings on Business Performance (with Michael Luca and Abhishek Nagaraj). Minor second round revision invited at Management Science
We evaluate the extent to which small businesses maintain an online presence and estimate the impact of digital representation on business performance. Looking at a large review platform, we find that roughly 18 percent of bars and restaurants in our sample do not have a listing as of the end of 2017, even though creating one is simple and free. We then estimate the effect of adding a new listing using tax records on revenues combined with temporal variation in listing activity, as well as a natural experiment that added over a thousand businesses to the platform via a data acquisition. New listings increase revenues in the range of 5-10%; however, these effects vary substantially across establishments. Establishments that struggle to develop a reputation (e.g. non-chains or those in tourist areas) and those with a higher quality of product (e.g. larger restaurants or those with good reviews) experience larger increases after being listed.
Gender Gaps in Patent Citation (with Michelle Saksena)
Innovation relies heavily on prior research and knowledge, and primary way by which innovation flows are measured is using patent citations. In this paper, we examine the relationship between inventor gender and the likelihood that a patent is cited by subsequent patents. We find that patents with majority-female authorship receive approximately 13% fewer citations than patents with majority-male authorship. We then explore the potential drivers of this gap and find evidence that citations to women's patents are more likely to be omitted from patent bibliographies in which they could have been included, and that female inventors' work is less frequently built upon-- and thus less often cited-- than male inventors' patents. This work has implications for our understanding of gender segregation in innovative fields, as well as the limitations of citations as a measure of patent impact.
The Career Costs of Sexual Harassment: Evidence from Gendered Attrition in Academia (with Andreea Gorbatai)
In this work, we examine how gender discrimination and sexual harassment contribute to women's disproportionate attrition out of the sciences. We use the results of an anonymous survey of over 6,000 doctoral students to evaluate how experiencing harassment is related to students' career intentions. We find that female students are almost ten times more likely to be victims of gender and sexual harassment. Students who experience gender discrimination and/or sexual harassment are 42.3% less likely to report that they plan to pursue academic research careers, and they experience a greater decrease in interest in a research career than their peers. Gendered harassment can account for almost 60% of female students' lack of interest in pursuing research careers.
Gender and Application Dynamics in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Applications
How does one measure an individual inventor's patenting activities? Prior research has documented repeat patenters as those who receive more than one patent. However, the lack of data that tracks all patenting activity, including ungranted and abandoned patents, has made it impossible to measure the effects of applications that do not convert to patents, but still may represent meaningful innovative contributions. In this paper, I detail the construction of a novel, open-access dataset that tracks inventors and identifies all patent applications and granted patents from individuals from 2001 onwards. I identify 2.4 million unique inventors across 4.6 million applications. I describe this data and outline future directions for research.