Firms poach engineers and researchers from each other all the time. One important reason to do so is to gain access to the individual’s knowledge. A strain of theory going back to Becker, however, suggests that if, after the poaching, the knowledge remains embodied solely in the new employer, it will be difficult for the firm to profit: surely the new employee will have an enormous amount of bargaining power over wages if she actually possesses unique and valuable information. (As part of my own current research project, I learned recently that Charles Martin Hall, co-inventor of the Hall-Heroult process for aluminum smelting, was able to gather a fortune of around $300 million after he brought his idea to the company that would become Alcoa.)
In a resource-based view of the firm, then, you may hope to not only access a new employer’s knowledge, but also spread it to other employees at your firm. By doing this, you limit the wage bargaining power of the new hire, and hence can scrape off some rents. Singh and Agrawal break open the patent database to investigate this. First, use name and industry data to try to match patentees who have an individual patent with one firm at time t, and then another patent at a separate firm some time later; such an employee has “moved”. We can’t simply check whether the receiving firm cites this new employee’s old patents more often, as there is an obvious endogeneity problem. First, firms may recruit good scientists more aggressively. Second, they may recruit more aggressively in technology fields where they are already planning to do work in the future. This suggests that matching plus diff-in-diff may work. Match every patent to another patent held by an inventor who never switches firms, attempting to find a second patent with very similar citation behavior, inventor age, inventor experience, technology class, etc. Using our matched sample, check how much the propensity to cite the mover’s patent changes compares to the propensity to the cite the stayer’s patent. That is, let Joe move to General Electric. Joe had a patent while working at Intel. GE researchers were citing that Intel patent once per year before Joe moved. They were citing a “matched” patent 1 times per year. After the move, they cite the Intel patent 2 times per year, and the “matched” patent 1.1 times per year. The diff-in-diff then suggests that moving increases the propensity to cite the Intel patent at GE by (2-1)-(1.1-1)=.9 citations per year, where the first difference helps account for the first type of endogeneity we discussed above, and the second difference for the second type of endogeneity.
What do we find? It is true that, after a move, the average patent held by a mover is cited more often at the receiving firm, especially in the first couple years after a move. Unfortunately, about half of new patents which cite the new employee’s old patent after she moves are made by the new employee herself, and another fifteen percent or so are made by previous patent collaborators of the poached employee. What’s worse, if you examine these citations by year, even five years after the move, citations to the pre-move patent are still highly likely to come from the poached employee. That is, to the extent that the poached employee had some special knowledge, the firm appears to have simply bought that knowledge embodied in the new employee, rather than gained access to useful techniques that quickly spread through the firm.
Three quick comments. First, applied econometrician friends: is there any reason these days to do diff-in-diff linearly rather than using the nonparametric “changes-in-changes” of Athey and Imbens 2006, which allows recovery of the entire distribution of effects of treatment on the treated? Second, we learn from this paper that the mean poached research employee doesn’t see her knowledge spread through the new firm, which immediately suggests the question of whether there are certain circumstances in which such knowledge spreads. Third, this same exercise could be done using all patents held by the moving employee’s old firm – I may be buying access to general techniques owned by the employee’s old firm rather than the specific knowledge represented in that employee’s own pre-move patents. I wonder if there’s any difference.
Final Management Science version (IDEAS version). Big thumbs up to Jasjit Singh for putting final published versions of his papers up on his site.
A Fine Theorem 