The Center's Doctoral Fellowship Program provides opportunities for highly qualified doctoral students to pursue independent thesis research in fields related to the Center's mission. Candidates are selected on a competitive basis and are drawn from across the Institute.
Listed below are brief descriptions of the research carried out by each Fellow. The topics are meant to be illustrative of the cross-disciplinary work being done at the IPC. These topics are by no means exhaustive of the work that the IPC would consider funding through its Fellowship Program.
Dr. Azoulay is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Dr. Azoulay studies the productivity of drug development, particularly the impact of organizational practices such as outsourcing and reliance on "for-profit" clinical investigators during the clinical trials process. Through the use of a unique dataset and econometric techniques, he used the setting of drug development to explore more general issues of incentive design in data producing industries, a fast growing sector of the world economy.
Dr. Batt is currently Associate Professor of Human Resource Studies at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University. You may reach her at re41@cornell.edu.
U.S. firms have responded to intensified competition over the last two decades by experimenting with a wide range of cost-cutting and performance enhancing strategies. The goal of this research was to understand what constitutes "high performance work organization" in service industries, how to evaluate or measure it, and what kinds of human resource and industrial relations strategies are needed to implement and sustain high performance. The telecommunication service industry was chosen as a case study because deregulation and technology change were inducing firms to undertake radical changes in work organization in order to maintain competitive, and because it is a core industry for the future growth of our economy.
Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Breznitz considers the role of the state in developing a new economy in societies that have struggled in the past; his research focuses on the information technology industry in Ireland, Israel, and Taiwan.
Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
Over the past two decades, trade liberalization has become an important part of many countries' development strategies. Proponents of liberalization argue that it will benefit consumers and producers, by providing access to lower priced goods and inputs, as well as lead to efficient reallocation within the country. In 1991, India experienced a particular sharp change in tariffs. This project used this variation in trade policies to understand liberalizations' effect on trade policy. Special attention will be paid to the possibility that lack of access to credit may limit the gains from trade. For example, if firms are unable to make capital investment to adopt new production techniques, liberalization could be less beneficial than standard models predict.
Dr. Eaton died on Tuesday, December 30, 2003 of complications from leukemia. She was Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard from 2000 until her death in 2003.
Dr. Engel's research developed a rigorous method for evaluating and choosing among alternative manufacturing technologies using chiral drugs as an example. The method took into account costs, safety, environmental burden, flexibility, and uncertainty. The major contribution of this research was to formalize a structured procedure for updating alternative designs leading to an optimal, efficient and quick solution.
Dr. Fine is currently Assistant Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University.
This project explored labor-based union organizing strategies that attempt to take wages out of competition and set uniform standards across firms in geographic areas by industrial sector. Due to changes on the macro- and micro-economic levels (as well as an increasingly anti-union political climate) labor unions have lost their regulatory role in the economy. To regain it, they have to take a different approach to organizing workers than they have taken in the past few decades. First, they have to target markets or segments of markets, not individual firms. Second, they have to be 'community based' in their organizing outreach. Third, they need to avoid NLRB elections. Finally, they must articulate a vision of the general good. This research explores specific examples of 'community unionism' in Baltimore, Los Angeles, and New York in order to understand whether it is actually a new form of unionism and also to develop a theory of the circumstances in which it arises in a community.
Dr. Frost is currently Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario.
Traditional explanations have failed to adequately account for the persistent variation in the outcomes of workplace restructuring, especially with respect to forms of organization on the shop floor. Yet, recent research highlights the importance of so-called "high performance" forms of work organization in achieving competitive success. The objective of this research project is to investigate the process of restructuring, and to understand how the process of change contributes to the success or failure of restructuring efforts. Specifically, this research focuses on the role played by the local union in affecting the process of change.
Dr. Frost is currently Associate Professor, Global Environment of Business, Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario.
Dr. Frost's research evaluated the impact of multinational firms on technology diffusion among their host countries. Over the past two decades, dramatic changes in the international economy have fundamentally altered the institutional environment and competitiveness of multinational firms. One of the farthest-reaching changes concerns the international distribution of science and technology. The preeminence of the U.S. innovation system faces a challenge today from new scientific and technological discoveries in Japan and Europe. An analysis of national patenting records reveals the growing role of multinational firms as conduits for the dissemination of technical and scientific discoveries.
Dr. Fuchs is currently Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr Fuchs' dissertation presents a two-case study of the impact of manufacturing offshore on the technology trajectory of the firm and the industry. It looks in particular at the automotive and optoelectronics industries. The dissertation uses an innovative combination of engineering modeling and qualitative research methods to provide insights into this question. The results suggest an important difference between the two cases. In the automotive case, the results do not show that manufacturing offshore changes the path of technology development. In the optoelectronics case, the results do suggest that manufacturing offshore may be changing the path of technology development. The cross-case analysis reveals several important similarities between the two cases: (1) the relative economic positions of the emerging technology and the prevailing design shift when production is transferred to developing East Asia; (2) the emerging design is cost-competitive over a greater range of products in the U.S. production structure than in the developing East Asia production structure; (3) firms initially do not understand the implications of moving offshore for the competitiveness of their designs; (4) firms choose to produce the prevailing design offshore; and (5) although the firms' decisions to produce the prevailing design offshore are rational in a static model, these decisions are not rational in a dynamic model if the emerging technology is critical to long-term markets. In its conclusion, this dissertation suggests a generalizable framework for how technology may influence manufacturing location options and how manufacturing location may influence technology options.
Dr. Fuller is currently at the University of London's King's College Department of Management.
Dr. Fuller examined what types of domestic institutional environments and policies in the developing world can best use international production networks to advance into higher value-added activities.
Dr. Furman is currently Assistant Professor, Strategy & Policy Department at Boston University's School of Management.
Dr. Furman's research examines the relationship between geographic factors and firm strategies. Specifically, the dissertation examines the extent to which factors that vary across geographic regions explain heterogeneous organizational practices in drug discovery, the first phase of pharmaceutical research. Through analyses of publication and patenting records and an historical analysis of the development of selected clusters of drug discovery laboratories, this project evaluates the impact of the magnitude and quality of a region's public and private scientific base on the organization (and productivity) of industrial research facilities.
Associate Professor, Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Tsinghua University
Dr. Eugene Gholz is Assistant Professor, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
New trade theory offers a purely economic argument for interventionist trade policies in certain strategic industries. Many economists, however, warn that politicians, carelessly applying the industrial policy ideas will open a Pandora's box of protectionism: because the prescribed subsidies would be allocated by fallible, political processes, they may be captured by inefficient producers. Paul Krugman and others argue that the only solution is to tie the hands of government, blocking all promises of government supports to high-tech industries. But this rejectionist prescription results from the traditional focus of economists and Europhile political scientists on direct subsidies to producer interests. Governments can circumvent industries' natural information advantages and close off distortionary political access routes by using knowledgeable consumers as an agent to distribute subsidies. Regulation of service providers (telephone companies or airlines) influences the competitive dynamics of manufacturing industries (switching equipment or aircraft companies) and can therefore be designed to give incentives to expand sales or to spur innovation. The key question is whether these indirect subsidy mechanisms satisfy the political pressures that industrial interests, in their effort to capture subsidies, bring to bear on governments. Comparative evidence from the American and European aircraft and telecommunications sectors supports the case for a broadening of the menu of subsidy policies, specifically by comparing the politics of direct efforts to subsidize production of jet aircraft and digital telephone switches on the two continents to the indirect politics of the airline and telecommunications deregulation debates.
Center for Global Development
Dr. Goelman is Project Leader in the Applied Research Division of the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
Dr. Goelman investigated the impact of recently adopted information technologies on the work of doctors and other health care professionals, with a focus on the process through which changes occurred. This research explicitly adopts the assumption that the use of new technologies is not value neutral, and that the political process through which a technology comes to be used plays an integral role in explaining outcomes.
Dr. Hart is currently Associate Professor, George Mason School of Public Policy.
Dr. Hart's research explored the political origins of U.S. industrial technology policy in the 1930s and 1940, especially the decision to support innovation through federal grants for university-based research. Case studies of the chemical, housing, and communications industries explored the roles of industry and the state in designing the institutional governance of national innovation.
Post-Doctoral Fellow and IPC Research Associate
Dr. Hatakenaka approached industry-university relations not from the viewpoint of how an individual company can better leverage the knowledge base of universities, but how universities can play a more active role in a nation's innovation system.
Dr. Hitt is the Alberto Vitale Term Associate Professor of Operations and Information Management, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School.
Dr. Hitt's research elucidated how the internal organization of large firms influences productivity and the ability of firms to achieve economic benefits from investments in information technology.
Dr. Hoffer Gittell is currently Assistant Professor, The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University.
Dr. Hoffer Gittell's research explored the adaptation of cross-functional coordination of employees in the airline industry. Employee coordination, especially in complicated and integrated tasks such as embarcation, can afford carriers a competitive advantage in the form of lower costs, faster turn-around, and punctual service. Yet a tradition of strong functional boundaries within the industry has kept some carriers from adopting such cross-functional coordination.
Assistant Professor, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University.
How do employees – accountants, production supervisors, information technology managers, and engineers – become engaged in and committed to organizational change efforts? This research examines how employees become mobilized to actively participate in process improvement and redesign efforts involving methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Business Process Re-engineering. Research on organizational change usually focuses change leaders and the experience of the members of change teams is less well understood despite their role in introducing, legitimating, and managing change among the rank and file of the organization. Specifically this research explores the process through which change methodologies become a compelling ideological and emotional force in the lives of members of the change team.
Assistant Professor, New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service Program
Drawing on cases of government innovation in Morocco and Mexico, Dr. Iskander analyzed the processes by which countries have successfully elaborated effective policies to support the relationship between economic development and the international migration of low-skilled labor.
Assistant Professor of Management, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
This dissertation examines the role of cognitive frames in strategic decision-making during periods of rapid technological change. Specifically, it analyzes how communications technology firms made strategic choices in the context of the unfolding fiber-optic revolution. The multi-method research uses two studies to examine micro-level strategy practices of the individuals and groups and macro-level actions of firms as they perceive, react to and shape environmental change, including: (1) a qualitative exploration of one firm, employing ethnographic techniques to unpack the mechanisms connecting cognitive frames and strategic choice, and (2) a panel dataset of 72 communication technology firms testing the effect of top management recognition of optical technologies on strategic action.
Dr. King is Associate Professor at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College.
In previous research, Dr. King showed that the waste of a production process can serve to expose production problems and that the sensivitity of waste treatment equipment determines the extent to which pollution control and production personnel assist process engineering in improving production processes, either by providing process information or by generating innovation ideas. This project explored the organizational conditions that best encouraged cross-functional transfer of industrial innovation and estimated the performance impact of these organizational conditions.
Dr. King is currently Director, Greylock McKinnon Associates.
Innovation drives economic growth and our hopes for future prosperity, but invention alone is not sufficient for economic progress. To be useful, innovations must be exploited and diffused in the market through acquisition, adoption, imitation, or licensing. The venture capital industry provides a unique and little explored laboratory to study economic issues governing innovations and their diffusion through industry. King's research asks two questions about the role of venture capital in new company creation. First, do venture capitalists continue to add value to the firms they finance after these firms go public? Second, does the nature of the innovation, financial factors, and market structure affect the outcomes of firms financed by venture capitalists when they leave the venture fund.
Ms. Kumar's research project is an ethnographic study of the impact of Information and communication technology (ICT) on the competitiveness of India's largest agribusiness company, ITC-IBD, and focusses on the relationship between farmers and intermediaries. Preliminary ethnographic research suggests that despite claims of disintermediation by ITC-IBD, the same intermediaries are now linking farmers to the company. Further research is required to understand what impact, if any, ICTs have had on farmers and on the overall competitiveness of ITC-IBD. Are there truly "virtual" ways for third world countries with large agrarian populations to become more competitive? By studying one such attempt in India, this research hopes to link together the possible role of information technology in agriculture with existing literature on competitiveness in industrial production, as well as understand the sociopolitical dynamics underlying market forces.
Dr. Lautsch is Assistant Professor, Management and Organization Studies, Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Lautsch's research explored the impact of contingent workers both on firms and on their permanent work forces. A national survey of firms, combined with detailed comparative cases studies, revealed that contingent work is a heterogenous phenomenon whose impact depends on the overall system of work in which it is embedded. Two main models of contingent work emerged, however, which tend to generate distinctive workplace tensions and performance profiles.
Despite widespread agreement from clinical, business, and policy circles on the benefits of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), doctors' offices and medical facilities have been slow to transition away from paper records. The healthcare industry's resistance to the incorporation of information technology (IT) comes at a serious cost to social welfare, making IT under-investment both a driver and a manifestation of deep-seated, structural problems with the way this industry operates and its workers perform their everyday work. My dissertation, grounded in a single organization's investment in and deployment of EHRs, unpacks the interplay of IT and the employment relationship. Econometric analysis reveals that the deployment of tangible IT comes much more easily and more cheaply than the concomitant mobilization of organizational and human capital. Indeed, inattention to or mismanagement of these intangible forms of capital—workplace-specific knowledge, workflow redesign, channels for worker voice, among others—proves far more onerous to organizations and far more deleterious to IT effectiveness than anything inherent to the hardware or software. Public policy that focuses on tangible, technological capital alone will not correct the market failure in this particular industry. Moreover, management strategy in this or other industries looking to squeeze returns from IT should focus at least as much on mobilizing IT's essential, intangible complements as on the IT itself.
The effect of international production on labor markets in advanced industrial economies has become the subject of intense debate. Most agree however, that the growing ease with which domestic firms can invest in and outsource from affiliates in low-wage countries has created a new set of pressures on workers in advanced countries. This research examines the relationship between international production and occupational structures, skill development, and wages in U.S. manufacturing.
Ms. McCaffrey's dissertation examines the skills that are needed in a global economy and how national skill-building institutions respond to the pressures of globalization; her research will focus on globalization and skill-building in two industrial sectors (textile/apparel and information technology) in three countries (Italy, Germany, and the United States).
Dr. McCormick is Assistant Professor; Regional Economics and Planning, Community Development, Hunter College, CUNY
Dr. McCormick's research culminated a multi-year investigation into the restructuring of Chicago's metalworking industry. She examined how different patterns of interfirm relations produce differential outcomes for groups of firms and workers. Specifically, past customer relationships among "customer" firms and their metalworking suppliers are conditioning Chicago's manufacturing complex as a whole to develop predominently "vertical," rather than "horizontal," networks among firms in the new era of flexible production.
Dr. Okada is Associate Professor, Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University.
Dr. Okada's research, through a comparative case study of two leading auto manufacturers and their suppliers in India, examined the conditions under which firms facilitate the development of their workers' skills in the process of globalization. She considered various institutional factors such as the roles of inter-firm linkages, regulatory framework, and links between firms and formal training institutions.
Consultant, Boston Consulting Group
Dr. Pinney traced the evolution of the notion and techniques of project management before they emerged under those names in the management and engineering literature of the 1960's. In addition to history, he looked to contemporary organizational sociology with an emphasis on the organization and culture of work. This topic is of particular interest today, since much of the rhetoric about the new, "networked" and "virtual" economy centers around project rather than bureaucratic management.
Mr. Pycia's research focuses on organizational and behavioral economics. He will be expanding on his case study of Sun Hydraulics Corporation where the corporate culture and organizational structure is characterized by horizontal management, open communication, and group self-management.
Dr. Ratanawaraha's dissertation focussed on the relationships between standards, technological development, and trade in developing countries.
Dr. Rodriguez is currently Assistant Professor, Organization and Management, Gozieta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta.
Dr. Rodriguez' research described development decisions that pharmaceutical firms have made over the past 12 years, elucidated trends in those decisions, and determined the factors which most affect those decisions. Specifically, his research considered the costs and benefits of various contractual arrangements between discovering firms and developing firms, estimated the gains in terms of reductions in terms of time to market, and the increases in the value of the final marketed product from one contractual arrangement or another.
Dr. Rodriguez is currently Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
The biotechnology industry has grown at a double-digit rate since its inception. Analysis of the drug approval process shows that the regulatory setting has an important impact on the competitive environment of pharmaceutical companies. Regulations affect the efficiency of the drug market by creating barriers to entry and ex-post monopolies. Regulations also maintain the position of U.S. biotechnology firms in global competition by hollowing out investment in countries with less stringent regulatory structures.
Dr. Shipper is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Shipper's work looks at innovative social institutions for foreign workers in Japan. Given Japan's insecurity and skepticism toward foreigners, why do the Japanese establish numerous NGOs to support foreign migrants in their midst? His finding challenges the conventional Western belief that the Japanese state controls and shapes civil society associations. Operating against Japanese laws and under relative inexperience with foreigners, progressive Japanese form support groups to share expertise, to raise necessary fund, and to legitimize their activities in order to provide requested services to "illegal" foreign workers. These institutions were created not to build "meaning" among members from various ethnic groups like those in the West but to serve "useful" purposes for both the Japanese creators and their foreign clients.
Dr. Slaughter is currently Associate Professor of Business Administration, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College.
Dr. Slaughter's research explored the impact of globalization on the growth in U.S. wage dispersion in the 1980s. Analysis of U.S. manufacturing wage data from the 1980s shows that the growing wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor resulted not from increased international trade, as described in the Stopler-Samuelson model, but instead from an increase in the practice of component outsourcing by multinational firms.
Dr. Sobrero is currently a Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. You may contact him at mau@economia.unibo.it.
Dr. Sobrero's research described and evaluated empirically the role of of supplier-manufacturer interactions on the development of innovation. A study of white goods production in the European home appliance industry revealed that a competitive environment of growing market fragmentation, shorter product cycles, and overlapping product generations has increased the importance of close supplier relations in product innovation.
Dr. Srinivas is currently Assistant Professor at Columbia University and Director of the Technological Change and Urban Social Policy research unit (TCUSP).
The dissertation looked at why common institutional and R&D markers for technological evolution have limited relevance to understanding Indian pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals. The research showed that there have been three distinct market environments and at least three broad types of associated learning which have allowed technological advance, but also constrained opportunities for access. Sub-sectors such as vaccines, have since been analyzed in detail (e.g. Srinivas, World Development, 2006). Her current work continues this interest in health and welfare, and focuses on the links between technology-led development and welfare regimes.
Dr. Trumbull is currently Associate Professor in Business Management at Harvard Business School.
Dr. Trumbull's dissertation research addressed the growth of product market regulation in France and Germany between 1970 and 1990, with an emphasis on the political origins of distinctive national approaches to product market regulation. Through his fellowship, he extended his research to include the United States as a case for comparison, and to assess the impact of different national approaches to product market regulation on product innovation.