Essays in the economics of technology and innovation
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The first two chapters of this dissertation study how companies find and organize highly skilled engineers and scientists. The first chapter examines the behavior of job seekers and recruiters in the labor market for software engineers. I obtained data from a recruiting platform where individuals can self-report their computer programming skills and recruiters can message individuals they wish to contact about job opportunities. I augment this dataset with measures of each individual's previous programming experience based on analysis of actual computer source code they wrote and shared within the open-source software community. This novel dataset reveals that female programmers with previous experience in a programming language are 9.40% less likely than their male counterparts to self-report knowledge of that programming language on their resume. Despite public pronouncements, however, recruiters do not appear more inclined toward recruiting female candidates who self-report knowing programming languages. The second chapter of this dissertation explores how and why scientific teams are formed as well as what factors contribute to their success. Richard Freeman, Ina Ganguli, and I investigate the connections among coauthors using data from an original survey of corresponding authors and the Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in the fields of Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. We have three main findings. First, we find that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities resembling that across countries. Second, face-to-face meetings are important in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Third, the main reason for most collaborations is to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors. The third chapter of this dissertation explores how particular legal policies can inspire company investments in technology adoption. I evaluate if data breach notification laws--legal mandates that companies who have had their data accessed by unauthorized individuals inform their customers--encourage firms to invest in information technology security. To evaluate the impact of data breach notification laws, I collected data on the decisions of 2,185 public companies regarding when to update their web server software and apply security patches during the two years before and after California legislators created the first data breach notification law in the United States. Comparisons are made with groups of companies that were not directly affected by the this law. I find that following the data breach notification law in California, firms based in that state used web server software that was 4.88-12.06% newer.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Murciano-Goroff, Raviv |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Levin, Jonathan D. (Jonathan David), 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Levin, Jonathan D. (Jonathan David), 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Bresnahan, Timothy F |
| Thesis advisor | Niederle, Muriel |
| Degree committee member | Bresnahan, Timothy F |
| Degree committee member | Niederle, Muriel |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Raviv Murciano-Goroff. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Robert Raviv Murciano-Goroff
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