Scholars@Duke
Sharon Belenzon

Sharon Belenzon

Fundación Damm Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Fuqua School of Business
sharon.belenzon@duke.edu
Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120
Fuqua School of Business, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

When does patent protection spur cumulative research within firms?

Journal Article Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization · November 1, 2024 We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent provides. Using data on public, research-active firms b ... Full text Cite

Managing risk in corporate groups: Limited liability, asset partitioning, and risk compartmentalization

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · December 1, 2023 Research Summary: Limited liability enables corporate parents to avoid financial responsibility of their subsidiaries. However, courts can disregard separate legal personality, “pierce the corporate veil,” and impose the debts of a subsidiary on its parent ... Full text Cite

First-mover advantage and the private value of public science

Journal Article Research Policy · November 1, 2023 Technical progress increasingly relies on the use of scientific knowledge. But if much of this knowledge is in the public domain, can it be a source of private value? We find that average private returns to using public science are small, especially in cro ... Full text Cite

Science and the Market for Technology

Journal Article Management Science · October 1, 2022 Well-functioning markets for technology (MFT) allow inventors to sell their inventions to others that may derive more value from them. We argue that the growing use of science in inventions enhances MFT. Science-based inventions have higher gains from trad ... Full text Cite

Matching patents to compustat firms, 1980–2015: Dynamic reassignment, name changes, and ownership structures

Journal Article Research Policy · June 1, 2021 This paper describes the methodology used to construct a new sample of patents matched to Compustat firms for the period 1980–2015. We compare our data to existing NBER data sets and underscore several methodological improvements, including dynamic matchin ... Full text Cite

Knowledge sharing in alliances and alliance portfolios

Scholarly Edition · March 1, 2021 We develop a model of knowledge sharing in alliances and alliance portfolios. We show that, once the issue of encouraging effective collaboration is put center stage, many standard intuitions of the learning race view and alliance portfolio literature are ... Full text Cite

Knowledge Spillovers and Corporate Investment in Scientific Research

Journal Article American Economic Review · March 1, 2021 Using data on 800,000 corporate publications and patent citations to these publications between 1980 and 2015, we study how corporate investment in research is linked to its use in the firm’s inventions, and to spillovers to rivals. We find that private re ... Full text Cite

Choosing between growth and glory

Journal Article Management Science · May 1, 2020 Prior work has established that the financing environment can impact firm strategy. We argue that this influence can shape the earliest strategic choices of a new venture by creating a potential trade-off between two objectives: rapid growth and reaping th ... Full text Cite

The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth

Journal Article · January 1, 2020 A defining feature of modern economic growth is the systematic application of science to advance technology. However, despite sustained progress in scientific knowledge, recent productivity growth in the United States has been disappointing. We review majo ... Full text Cite

The architecture of attention: Group structure and subsidiary autonomy

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · October 1, 2019 Research Summary: This paper examines the relationship between strategic decision-making at the subsidiary level and organizational structure. In many organizations, headquarters and subsidiaries are separated by intermediate subsidiaries. Building on the ... Full text Cite

Flexible production and entry: Institutional, technological, and organizational determinants

Journal Article Strategy Science · September 1, 2019 Academics, the media, and policy makers have all raised concerns about the implications of human workers being replaced by machines or software. Few have discussed the implications of the reverse: firms' ability to replace capital with workers. We show tha ... Full text Cite

CEO's age and the performance of closely held firms

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · June 1, 2019 Research Summary: Using detailed ownership and financial information from a large sample of owner-managed private firms in three Western European countries, this paper examines the relationship between CEO's age and firm's performance. Tracking firms over ... Full text Cite

Companies persist with biomedical papers.

Journal Article Nature · May 2019 Full text Cite

A theory of the US innovation ecosystem:Evolution and the social value of diversity

Journal Article Industrial and Corporate Change · April 1, 2019 This article reviews evidence on the changing structure of the US innovation ecosystem and then develops a simple model of the rise and fall of the large corporate lab. We suggest that the growth of American universities allowed at first the formation of l ... Full text Cite

Reversed citations and the localization of knowledge spillovers

Scholarly Edition · May 1, 2018 Spillover of knowledge is considered to be an important cause of agglomeration of inventive activity. Many studies argue that knowledge spillovers are localized based on the observation that patents tend to cite nearby patents disproportionately. Specifica ... Full text Cite

The decline of science in corporate R&D

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · January 1, 2018 Research summary: In this article, we document a shift away from science by large corporations between 1980 and 2006. We find that publications by company scientists have declined over time in a range of industries. We also find that the value attributable ... Full text Cite

Papers to patents.

Journal Article Nature · December 2017 Full text Cite

A firm that shares a name with its founder earns higher profits

Journal Article Economist (United Kingdom) · August 19, 2017 Cite

Eponymous entrepreneurs

Journal Article American Economic Review · June 1, 2017 We demonstrate that eponymy-firms being named after their owners-is linked to superior firm performance, but is relatively uncommon (about 19 percent of firms in our data). We propose an explanation based on eponymy creating an association between the entr ... Full text Cite

Back to Basics: Why Do Firms Invest in Research?

Scholarly Edition · February 2017 Cite

Married to the firm? A large-scale investigation of the social context of ownership

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · December 1, 2016 Research summary: Using a large sample of private firms across Europe, we examine how the social context of owners affects firm strategy and performance. Drawing on embeddedness theory and the institutional logics perspective, we argue that embeddedness in ... Full text Cite

Market frictions and the competitive advantage of internal labor markets

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · July 1, 2016 Research summary: We show that frictions in labor and capital markets can be a source of competitive advantage for affiliates of corporate groups over stand-alone firms in environments where benefits from internal markets' flexibility are high. We argue th ... Full text Cite

Motivation and sorting of human capital in open innovation

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · June 1, 2015 This paper studies how business models can be designed to tap effectively into open innovation labor markets with heterogeneously motivated workers. Using data on open source software, we show that motivations are diverse, and demonstrate how managers can ... Full text Cite

Make, buy, organize: The interplay between research, external knowledge, and firm structure

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · March 1, 2014 We bridge current streams of innovation research to explore the interplay between R&D, external knowledge, and organizational structure - three elements of a firm's innovation strategy, which we argue should logically be studied together. Using within-firm ... Full text Cite

How does firm size moderate firms' ability to benefit from invention? Evidence from patents and scientific publications

Journal Article European Management Review · January 1, 2014 Using novel firm-level panel data, this paper investigates how firms' ability to benefit from invention is moderated by firm size. We distinguish between output indicators of applied research using patents versus output indicators of basic research using s ... Full text Cite

Spreading the word: Geography, policy, and Knowledge spillovers

Scholarly Edition · October 28, 2013 Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance and are strongly constrained by state borders. The effect of d ... Full text Cite

Capital markets and firm organization: How financial development shapes European corporate groups

Journal Article Management Science · June 1, 2013 We investigate the effect of financial development on the formation of European corporate groups. Because cross-country regressions are hard to interpret in a causal sense, we exploit exogenous industry measures to investigate a specific channel through wh ... Full text Cite

Innovation and firm value: An investigation of the changing role of patents, 1985-2007

Journal Article Research Policy · January 1, 2013 This paper examines how the relationship between firm value and patent-based indicators of inventive activity has changed over time. We use data from more than 33,000 mergers and acquisitions deals between 1985 and 2007, and distinguish between American (U ... Full text Cite

Cumulative Innovation and Market Value: Evidence from Patent Citations

Journal Article Economic Journal · March 1, 2012 If innovations are rapidly made obsolete by subsequent discoveries, firms may have lower ex ante incentives to invest in R&D. This article empirically demonstrates the relevance of this problem and shows that it might be mitigated if the inventing firm rea ... Full text Cite

Innovation in business groups

Journal Article Management Science · March 1, 2010 Using novel data on European firms, this paper investigates the relationship between business groups and innovation. Controlling for various firm characteristics, we find that group affiliates are more innovative than standalones. We examine several hypoth ... Full text Open Access Cite

University knowledge transfer: Private ownership, incentives, and local development objectives

Journal Article Journal of Law and Economics · February 1, 2009 We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay, and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology-licensing offices using new survey information together with panel d ... Full text Cite