Lia Sheer, Ph.D.
I am an Assistant Professor of Strategy (Senior Lecturer, Tenure-Track) at the Coller School of Management of Tel-Aviv University, Israel. I research about managerial strategy, technology and innovation, corporate and public scientific research, markets for technology, and knowledge spillovers. More specifically, my research focuses on organizing scientific discovery for innovation inside R&D firms. As part of my research initiatives, I compile open-source large-scale firm-level datasets. My research has been featured in top academic journals, including American Economic Review, and Research Policy. I received my PhD in Business Administration (Strategy) from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. I was the 2020-2021 recipient of Fuqua's School of Business Best Dissertation Award. I earned an MBA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a B.A. in Economics from Tel-Aviv University. Prior to academia, I worked in the Banking Industry and was an Economic Consultant in the Ministry of Defense Budget Department, Israel. I am a co-founder of Fuqua-STAGE (Society to Advance Gender Equality in Business Academia) and an advocate for women in STEM.
PUBLICATIONS
- “Sitting on the fence: integrating the two worlds of scientific discovery and invention within the firm”, Research Policy, 51(7):104550, 2022
- “Knowledge spillovers and corporate investment in scientific research” (w/ A. Arora & S. Belenzon), American Economic Review, 111(3): 871-898, March 2021
- “Matching patents to Compustat firms, 1980-2015: Dynamic reassignment, name changes, and ownership structures” (w/ A. Arora & S. Belenzon), Research Policy, 50(5):10421, 2021
- Dataset: DISCERN: Duke Innovation & SCientific Enterprises Research Network (w/ A. Arora & S. Belenzon). Zenodo: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4320782, December 2020
WORKING PAPERS
The Effect of Public Science on Corporate R&D (w/ A. Arora & S. Belenzon & L. Cioaca)
Many established firms have substantially reduced their engagement in upstream scientific research since the 1980s. We examine how two components of public science---scientific knowledge and human capital---affect corporate investment in research and innovation. Empirically, we link firms with public science that is relevant to their innovation and trace funding sources. Identification is based on firm-specific exposure to (i) changes in federal agency R&D budgets and (ii) windfall funding from congressional appropriations. We find that public knowledge crowds out internal research, except for firms at the technology frontier ("frontier firms''), which continue to invest in internal research even when public knowledge relevant to their innovation is abundant. Second, human capital increases internal research and innovation, especially in frontier firms. We conclude that while the rise in public science can partly explain the decline in corporate science, the effect has been uneven across firms, affecting non-frontier firms more than frontier firms, and potentially amplifying the gap between them.
DATA
DISCERN: Duke Innovation & SCientific Enterprises Research Network [UPDATED DATA COMING IN 2023!!!]
The dataset traces more than 4,000 U.S. publicly traded R&D firms' investment in innovation and scientific discovery for 35 years. It includes patents, scientific articles, and NPL citations matched to Compustat firms over the period 1980-2015. It introduces a major extension and improvement to the historical NBER patent data (Hall, Jaffe, & Trajtenberg, 2001). In extending the match to Compustat up to 2015, we address two major challenges: name changes and ownership changes. The data including an historical firm name list with dynamic reassignment, are publicly available. First presented at the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) Innovation Information Initiative meeting in December 2019.
Download the data at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4320782
When using the data, please cite both papers below:
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Arora, A., Belenzon, S. and Sheer, L., 2021. Knowledge spillovers and corporate investment in scientific research. American Economic Review, 111(3), pp.871-98.
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Arora, A., Belenzon, S. and Sheer, L., 2021. Matching patents to Compustat firms, 1980–2015: Dynamic reassignment, name changes, and ownership structures. Research Policy, 50(5), p.104217.
I³: Open Innovation Dataset Index
A collection of innovation datasets, and related tools, platforms and resources used by the broader research community