PhD Seminar Series: Yu Chen and Zijing Yuan

The Impact of Industry IPOs on Incumbent Firms' CSR Strategy: A Human Capital Perspective

Speaker: Yu Chen (Bocconi University)

Abstract: This study examines how industry-level IPO activity influences incumbent firms’ employee-related corporate social responsibility (CSR) in high-tech industries. While prior research has investigated the strategic consequences of IPOs, it has largely overlooked labor market implications. Using a panel of U.S. high-tech firms from 1995 to 2018, we find that incumbents increase employee-related CSR following periods of heightened IPO activity. This response is stronger when incumbents are more similar to IPO firms in terms of products, are geographically proximate, or rely more heavily on skilled labor. These findings are consistent with the idea that employee-oriented CSR may serve as a strategic response to labor market competition triggered by IPO waves.

Patent Disclosure and Inventor Mobility

Speaker: Zijing Yuan (Bocconi University)

Abstract: Strategic human capital research has long emphasized that firms’ ability to capture value from employee knowledge depends on retaining, redeploying, and bargaining with mobile workers. Yet this literature often assumes that employee knowledge and the signals of that knowledge coexist. We argue that these two elements should be separated. Employees may accumulate valuable knowledge before outside firms can observe it, giving the current employer an information advantage. We study this mechanism in the context of inventor mobility, where the patenting process creates a staged shift in observability. Patent filing provides the current employer with a private signal of inventor's ability, whereas publication makes the information visible to external labor-market audiences. Using an inventor-firm-month panel that links patent records to career histories, we examine how these patent-stage transitions shape internal mobility, external mobility, unemployment, and spinout formation. By separating knowledge from its observability, this study shows that careers are shaped not only by what employees know, but also by when different audiences become able to evaluate what they know.