William R Kerr
Biographic Data
| ID | 985160 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William R Kerr |
| GIVEN NAMES | William R |
| FAMILY NAME | Kerr |
| SIGNATURE | KERR W R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bank of Finland |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7350-075X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 288 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Positioned at Extremes: Future Job Placements of Immigrant Students at US Colleges
Immigrant students who attend US colleges are disproportionately employed in either large firms — especially multinationals — or small firms and self-employment. Using linked Census and longitudinal employment data, we trace the jobs taken by college students in 2000 during the 2001–2020 period and evaluate four mechanisms shaping sector and firm size placement: geographic clustering, degree specialization, firm capabilities/visas, and ethnic sel…
JUE insight: Infrastructure and Finance: Evidence from India’s GQ highway network
Evolution of Urban Patterns: Urban Morphology as an Open Reproducible Data Science
The recent growth of geographic data science (GDS) fuelled by increasingly available open data and open source tools has influenced urban sciences across a multitude of fields. Yet there is limited application in urban morphology—a science of urban form. Although quantitative approaches to morphological research are finding momentum, existing tools for such analyses have limited scope and are predominantly implemented as plug‐ins for standalone g…
Foreword for special issue of Journal of Economic Geography on ‘Immigration in OECD Countries’
Tech Clusters
Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the growing influence of advanced technologies for businesses outside of traditional tech fields, the strains and backlash that tech clusters are experiencing,…
High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences
Immigration policy is one of the most contentious public policy issues in the United States today. High-skilled immigrants represent an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, particularly in science and engineering fields. These immigrants affect economic growth, patterns of trade, education choices, and the earnings of workers with different types of skills. The chapters in this volume go beyond the traditional question of how the inflow of for…
Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. T…
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
Citation: Akcigit, Ufuk, and William R. Kerr. "Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations." Journal of Political Economy 126, no. 4 (August 2018): 1374–1443. \nPublisher's link: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/697901 \nOther link where paper is available: https://www.nber.org/papers/w16443.pdf \nKeywords: Patents, Innovation Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth, Research and Development, Science
Global Collaborative Patents
We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative work, especially in settings where intellectual property protection is weak. We also connect collaborative patents to the ethnic composition of the firm s U.…
Transition to Clean Technology
We develop an endogenous growth model in which clean and dirty technologies compete in production. Research can be directed to either technology. If dirty technologies are more advanced, the transition to clean technology can be difficult. Carbon taxes and research subsidies may encourage production and innovation in clean technologies, though the transition will typically be slow. We estimate the model using microdata from the US energy sector. …
Highway to Success: The Impact of the Golden Quadrilateral Project for the Location and Performance of Indian Manufacturing
We investigate the impact of transport infrastructure on the organisation and efficiency of manufacturing activity. The Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project upgraded a central highway network in India. Manufacturing activity grew disproportionately along the network. These findings hold in straight-line IV frameworks and are not present on a second highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as GQ but subsequently delayed. Both entrants…
Global Talent Flows
Highly skilled workers play a central and starring role in today's knowledge economy. Talented individuals make exceptional direct contributions-including breakthrough innovations and scientific discoveries-and coordinate and guide the actions of many others, propelling the knowledge frontier and spurring economic growth. In this process, the mobility of skilled workers becomes critical to enhancing productivity. Substantial attention has been pa…
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes
We model spatial clusters of similar firms. Our model highlights how agglomerative forces lead to localized, individual connections among firms, while interaction costs generate a defined distance over which attraction forces operate. Overlapping firm interactions yield agglomeration clusters that are much larger than the underlying agglomerative forces themselves. Empirically, we demonstrate that our model’s assumptions are present in the struct…
Income inequality and social preferences for redistribution and compensation differentials
Political reservations and women's entrepreneurship in India
Entrepreneurship as Experimentation
Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation; the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level, experimentation by new firms underlies the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction. However, at a micro level, investment and continuation decisions…
Diasporas and Outsourcing: Evidence from oDesk and India
This paper examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. The data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts. Despite oDesk minimizing many of the frictions that diaspora connections have traditionally overcome, diaspora connections still matter on oDesk, with ethnic Indians substantially more likely to choose a worker in India. This higher placement is the result of a greate…
Local industrial structures and female entrepreneurship in India
We analyze the spatial determinants of female entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. We focus on the presence of incumbent female-owned businesses and their role in promoting higher subsequent female entrepre-neurship relative to male entrepreneurship. We find evidence of agglomeration economies in both sectors, where higher female ownership among incumbent businesses within a district-industry predicts that a greate…
Spatial Determinants of Entrepreneurship in India
Ghani E., Kerr W. R. and O'Connell S. Spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India, Regional Studies. The spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors are analysed. Among general district traits, the quality of the physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labour laws and household banking access also playing important roles. Extensive evidence i…
From Russia with love: The impact of relocated firms on incumbent survival
We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions of these firms upon moving to western Germany were driven by non-economic factors and heuristics rather than existing industrial conditions. Relocating fir…
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshall's theories of industrial agglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturing industries from the Economic Census. We then relate coagglomeration levels to the degree to which industry pairs share goods, labor, or ideas. To reduce reverse causality, where collocation drives input-output linka…
The Supply Side of Innovation: H‐1B Visa Reforms and U.S. Ethnic Invention
This study evaluates the impact of high-skilled immigrants on U.S. technology formation. We use reduced-form specifications that exploit large changes in the H-1B visa program. Higher H-1B admissions increase immigrant science and engineering (SE) employment and patenting by inventors with Indian and Chinese names in cities and firms dependent upon the program relative to their peers. Most specifications find limited effects for native SE employm…
Breakthrough inventions and migrating clusters of innovation
Clusters of entrepreneurship
Transition to Clean Technology
We develop an endogenous growth model in which clean and dirty technologies compete in production. Research can be directed to either technology. If dirty technologies are more advanced, the transition to clean technology can be difficult. Carbon taxes and research subsidies may encourage production and innovation in clean technologies, though the transition will typically be slow. We estimate the model using microdata from the US energy sector. …
Highway to Success: The Impact of the Golden Quadrilateral Project for the Location and Performance of Indian Manufacturing
We investigate the impact of transport infrastructure on the organisation and efficiency of manufacturing activity. The Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project upgraded a central highway network in India. Manufacturing activity grew disproportionately along the network. These findings hold in straight-line IV frameworks and are not present on a second highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as GQ but subsequently delayed. Both entrants…
Does Employment Protection Reduce Productivity? Evidence from US States
Theory predicts that mandated employment protection may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protection by state courts in the US from 1970 to 1999 to evaluate the empirical link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Census Bureau, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protection reduces employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreov…
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
Citation: Akcigit, Ufuk, and William R. Kerr. "Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations." Journal of Political Economy 126, no. 4 (August 2018): 1374–1443. \nPublisher's link: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/697901 \nOther link where paper is available: https://www.nber.org/papers/w16443.pdf \nKeywords: Patents, Innovation Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth, Research and Development, Science
Political reservations and women's entrepreneurship in India
Global Talent Flows
Highly skilled workers play a central and starring role in today's knowledge economy. Talented individuals make exceptional direct contributions-including breakthrough innovations and scientific discoveries-and coordinate and guide the actions of many others, propelling the knowledge frontier and spurring economic growth. In this process, the mobility of skilled workers becomes critical to enhancing productivity. Substantial attention has been pa…
Clusters of entrepreneurship
Spatial Determinants of Entrepreneurship in India
Ghani E., Kerr W. R. and O'Connell S. Spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India, Regional Studies. The spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors are analysed. Among general district traits, the quality of the physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labour laws and household banking access also playing important roles. Extensive evidence i…
Global Collaborative Patents
We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative work, especially in settings where intellectual property protection is weak. We also connect collaborative patents to the ethnic composition of the firm s U.…
Breakthrough inventions and migrating clusters of innovation
Tech Clusters
Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the growing influence of advanced technologies for businesses outside of traditional tech fields, the strains and backlash that tech clusters are experiencing,…
Entrepreneurship as Experimentation
Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation; the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level, experimentation by new firms underlies the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction. However, at a micro level, investment and continuation decisions…
Local industrial structures and female entrepreneurship in India
We analyze the spatial determinants of female entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. We focus on the presence of incumbent female-owned businesses and their role in promoting higher subsequent female entrepre-neurship relative to male entrepreneurship. We find evidence of agglomeration economies in both sectors, where higher female ownership among incumbent businesses within a district-industry predicts that a greate…
From Russia with love: The impact of relocated firms on incumbent survival
We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions of these firms upon moving to western Germany were driven by non-economic factors and heuristics rather than existing industrial conditions. Relocating fir…
Does Employment Protection Reduce Productivity? Evidence from US States
Theory predicts that mandated employment protection may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protection by state courts in the US from 1970 to 1999 to evaluate the empirical link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Census Bureau, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protection reduces employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreov…
Ethnic Scientific Communities and International Technology Diffusion
This study explores the role of U.S. ethnic scientific and entrepreneurial communities for international technology transfer to their home countries. U.S. ethnic researchers are quantified through an ethnic-name database and individual patent records. International patent citations confirm knowledge diffuses through ethnic networks, and manufacturing output in foreign countries increases with an elasticity of 0.1–0.3 to stronger scientific integr…
Local Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain?
Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demographics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only modestly important, but new entrants seem particularly drawn to areas with many smaller suppliers, as suggested by Chinitz (1961) . Abundant workers in relevant occupations also strong…
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshall's theories of industrial agglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturing industries from the Economic Census. We then relate coagglomeration levels to the degree to which industry pairs share goods, labor, or ideas. To reduce reverse causality, where collocation drives input-output linka…
The Supply Side of Innovation: H‐1B Visa Reforms and U.S. Ethnic Invention
This study evaluates the impact of high-skilled immigrants on U.S. technology formation. We use reduced-form specifications that exploit large changes in the H-1B visa program. Higher H-1B admissions increase immigrant science and engineering (SE) employment and patenting by inventors with Indian and Chinese names in cities and firms dependent upon the program relative to their peers. Most specifications find limited effects for native SE employm…
Breakthrough inventions and migrating clusters of innovation
Clusters of entrepreneurship
From Russia with love: The impact of relocated firms on incumbent survival
We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions of these firms upon moving to western Germany were driven by non-economic factors and heuristics rather than existing industrial conditions. Relocating fir…
Diasporas and Outsourcing: Evidence from oDesk and India
This paper examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. The data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts. Despite oDesk minimizing many of the frictions that diaspora connections have traditionally overcome, diaspora connections still matter on oDesk, with ethnic Indians substantially more likely to choose a worker in India. This higher placement is the result of a greate…
Local industrial structures and female entrepreneurship in India
We analyze the spatial determinants of female entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. We focus on the presence of incumbent female-owned businesses and their role in promoting higher subsequent female entrepre-neurship relative to male entrepreneurship. We find evidence of agglomeration economies in both sectors, where higher female ownership among incumbent businesses within a district-industry predicts that a greate…
Spatial Determinants of Entrepreneurship in India
Ghani E., Kerr W. R. and O'Connell S. Spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India, Regional Studies. The spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors are analysed. Among general district traits, the quality of the physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labour laws and household banking access also playing important roles. Extensive evidence i…
Income inequality and social preferences for redistribution and compensation differentials
Political reservations and women's entrepreneurship in India
Entrepreneurship as Experimentation
Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation; the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level, experimentation by new firms underlies the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction. However, at a micro level, investment and continuation decisions…
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes
We model spatial clusters of similar firms. Our model highlights how agglomerative forces lead to localized, individual connections among firms, while interaction costs generate a defined distance over which attraction forces operate. Overlapping firm interactions yield agglomeration clusters that are much larger than the underlying agglomerative forces themselves. Empirically, we demonstrate that our model’s assumptions are present in the struct…
Transition to Clean Technology
We develop an endogenous growth model in which clean and dirty technologies compete in production. Research can be directed to either technology. If dirty technologies are more advanced, the transition to clean technology can be difficult. Carbon taxes and research subsidies may encourage production and innovation in clean technologies, though the transition will typically be slow. We estimate the model using microdata from the US energy sector. …
Highway to Success: The Impact of the Golden Quadrilateral Project for the Location and Performance of Indian Manufacturing
We investigate the impact of transport infrastructure on the organisation and efficiency of manufacturing activity. The Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project upgraded a central highway network in India. Manufacturing activity grew disproportionately along the network. These findings hold in straight-line IV frameworks and are not present on a second highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as GQ but subsequently delayed. Both entrants…
Global Talent Flows
Highly skilled workers play a central and starring role in today's knowledge economy. Talented individuals make exceptional direct contributions-including breakthrough innovations and scientific discoveries-and coordinate and guide the actions of many others, propelling the knowledge frontier and spurring economic growth. In this process, the mobility of skilled workers becomes critical to enhancing productivity. Substantial attention has been pa…
High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences
Immigration policy is one of the most contentious public policy issues in the United States today. High-skilled immigrants represent an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, particularly in science and engineering fields. These immigrants affect economic growth, patterns of trade, education choices, and the earnings of workers with different types of skills. The chapters in this volume go beyond the traditional question of how the inflow of for…
Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. T…
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
Citation: Akcigit, Ufuk, and William R. Kerr. "Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations." Journal of Political Economy 126, no. 4 (August 2018): 1374–1443. \nPublisher's link: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/697901 \nOther link where paper is available: https://www.nber.org/papers/w16443.pdf \nKeywords: Patents, Innovation Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth, Research and Development, Science
Global Collaborative Patents
We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative work, especially in settings where intellectual property protection is weak. We also connect collaborative patents to the ethnic composition of the firm s U.…
Tech Clusters
Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the growing influence of advanced technologies for businesses outside of traditional tech fields, the strains and backlash that tech clusters are experiencing,…
Evolution of Urban Patterns: Urban Morphology as an Open Reproducible Data Science
The recent growth of geographic data science (GDS) fuelled by increasingly available open data and open source tools has influenced urban sciences across a multitude of fields. Yet there is limited application in urban morphology—a science of urban form. Although quantitative approaches to morphological research are finding momentum, existing tools for such analyses have limited scope and are predominantly implemented as plug‐ins for standalone g…
Economics (23 works) · Business (17 works) · Economic geography (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (11 works) · Firm Innovation and Growth (9 works) · Industrial organization (9 works) · Entrepreneurship (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Economic growth (7 works)