Sharon Belenzon

About

Sharon Belenzon is the Fundación Damm Distinguished Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy area at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His work examines how businesses shape and are shaped by the innovation ecosystem. He studies why corporations invest in science, why this engagement has declined, and how that shift is transforming the sources of technological progress. His research documents a structural change in the American innovation system: corporate labs once advanced frontier science, but their role has eroded as universities and startups have become the main engines of discovery. This redistribution of inventive activity creates new dependencies between firms and the science base and raises policy challenges related to sustaining the translation of research into market innovation when the actors generating knowledge differ from those commercializing it. Additionally, Belenzon studies how organizational structures and ownership models affect firms’ ability to innovate and compete, comparing how companies across advanced and emerging economies adapt their internal organization to local innovation systems and institutional constraints.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Statistics
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Marketing
• Social Science
• Industrial organization

Selected publications

• Knowledge Spillovers and Corporate Investment in Scientific Research

  American Economic Review · 2021 · 310 citations

  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 returns to corporate research depend on the balance between two opposing forces: the benefits from the use of science in own downstream inventions, and the costs of spillovers to rivals. Consistent with this, firms produce more research when it i…

  DOI

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

  Research Policy · 2021 · 98 citations

  PublisherDOI

• First-mover advantage and the private value of public science

  Research Policy · 2023 · 58 citations

  PublisherDOI

• Guaranteed Markets and Corporate Scientific Research

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-04-01 · 35 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To incentivize firms to develop innovative technologies, the U.S. government awards R&D contracts that often carry an implicit promise of "guaranteed demand." That is, firms that demonstrate superior technological capabilities are often rewarded with noncompetitive downstream procurement contracts for the resulting products and services. This is a key difference between R&D contracts and grants. Using newly assembled data on $5.9 trillion in government procurement contracts from all federal agen…

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Public Science on Corporate R&D

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-11-01 · 17 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ashish Arora

  85 shared

• Jungkyu Suh

  New York University

  34 shared

• Andrea Patacconi

  University of East Anglia

  33 shared

• Aaron Chatterji

  28 shared

• Brendan Daley

  Johns Hopkins University

  28 shared

• Mark Schankerman

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  19 shared

• Konstantin Kosenko

  18 shared

• Yishay Yafeh

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  18 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Business Administration

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1994

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1991

Awards & honors

• 2007 Kauffman Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the NBER

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Dan Arielyh-97
• James Bettmanh-70
• Ravi Bansalh-67