Showing results 1 - 10 of 12
| Tom Nicholas
July 2020, Paper, "In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen’s highly influential book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, the Business History Review (BHR) published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The BHR piece relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler’s work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was…
| Tom Nicholas
January 31, 2020, Paper, "Do white collar workers with lower social status in the occupational hierarchy die younger? The influential Whitehall studies of British civil servants identified a strong inverse relationship between employment rank and mortality, but we do not know if this effect generalizes. Using personnel files, census data and death records, I profile the lifespan and socioeconomic characteristics of a 1930 cohort of white collar…
| Tom Nicholas
VC: An American History. Tom Nicholas, 2019, Book, "A major exploration of venture financing, from its origins in the whaling industry to Silicon Valley, that shows how venture capital created an epicenter for the development of high-tech innovation. VC tells the riveting story of how the industry arose from the United States’ long-running orientation toward entrepreneurship. Venture capital has been driven from the start by the pull of outsized…
| Tom Nicholas | Stefanie Stantcheva
Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century. Tom Nicholas, Stefanie Stantcheva, September 2018, Paper, "This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location and patents of firms active in R&D since 1921; and a historical state-level corporate tax…
| Tom Nicholas
History, Micro Data, and Endogenous Growth. Tom Nicholas, September 8, 2018, Paper, "Economic growth is concerned with long-run changes, and therefore historical data should be especially influential in informing the development of new theories. In this paper we draw on the recent literature to highlight areas in which history has played a particularly prominent role in improving our understanding of growth dynamics. Research at the intersection…
| Tom Nicholas
Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity. Tom Nicholas, February 2017, Paper, "This paper builds on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using US patent and Census data to examine macro and micro-level aspects of the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of "foreign born expertise" and show that technology areas where immigrant inventors were prevalent between 1880 and 1940 experienced…
| Tom Nicholas
Linking the Growth of Globalisation with the Evolution of Transport Technology. Tom Nicholas, January 29, 2017, Paper, "We examine the golden age of U.S. innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking historical U.S. patents to state and county-level aggregates and matching inventors to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940. We identify a causal relationship between patented inventions and long-run economic growth and…
| Tom Nicholas
The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age. Tom Nicholas, January 2017, Paper, "We examine the golden age of US innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking US patents to state and county-level aggregates and matching inventors to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940. We identify a causal relationship between patented inventions and long run economic growth and outline a basic framework for…
| Tom Nicholas
The Origins of High-Tech Venture Investing in America. Tom Nicholas, October 2015, Book Chapter. "The United States has developed an unparalleled environment for the provision of high-tech investment finance. Today it is reflected in the strength of agglomeration economies in Silicon Valley, but historically its origins lay in the East Coast. Notably, the New England Council’s immediate post-WWII efforts to create the American Research and…
| Tom Nicholas
Prizes, Patents and the Search for Longitude. Tom Nicholas, July 2015, Paper, "The 1714 Longitude Act created the Board of Longitude to administer a large monetary prize and progress payments for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude. It is frequently cited to justify the use of prize-based incentives over patents. Using new data on marine chronometer inventors we show that while the timing of the Board’s progress payments did not…