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Research
Job Market Paper
Supply Chain Risk Management and Financial Constraints
Draft coming soon
Working Paper
Firms invest heavily in customer capital; such investment is a main source of intangible capital value. Customer capital investment is measured using sales and marketing expense from income statements, salaries paid to workers in sales and marketing, and text from SEC filings. There is large and persistent variation across industries in customer capital investment; industries investing the most are growing as a share of aggregate enterprise value. Variation in sales and marketing expense explains a large amount of industry-level variation in intangible capital value. Industries characterized by information frictions and network effects in demand invest most heavily in customer capital.
Publications
FinTech firms spend far more resources on sales and marketing efforts than traditional financial firms. In the language of He, Mostrom and Sufi (2025), substantial investment in customer capital is an instrumental component of the FinTech business strategy. This essay demonstrates this robust pattern and offers a preliminary assessment of the economics behind why customer capital is so critical for FinTech.
Venture Capital-Led Entrepreneurship in Health Care
With Amitabh Chandra and Cirrus Foroughi
in The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth (2022),
edited by Michael J. Andrews, Aaron Chatterji, Josh Lerner, and Scott Stern
A variety of pull and push forces influence innovation in health care, with venture capitalists playing an extremely important role in marshaling the pull forces that drive innovation. The NIH (or government more generally) is responsible for reducing market failure by subsidizing research that no commercial entity would fund. Our analysis has uncovered several new facts on the operation of these entities. On the VC side, VC dollar allocations have moved away from investment in health care, and a disproportionate share of VC investments— almost 60 percent— are in drugs and devices. While there are many justifications for this allocation, there is also a concern than the VC model will not automatically bring socially valuable innovations to market, because it will emphasize private returns over public ones... Another striking fact that deserves further exploration is that three locations account for the plurality of scientific research and also receive the majority of VC investments. Whether this represents higher quality research from these cities, or a “valley of death” is an important question for future research.
Teaching & Mentorship
Macroeconomics and the Business Environment (TA)
BUSN 33050, MBA and Executive
Instructors: Christina Patterson, Joe Vavra
2023-2025
Fama-Miller Research Professional Development Fellow
Chicago-Booth Fama-Miller Center
Oversaw the weekly seminar for Fama-Miller pre-docs to present their research, providing feedback on their work and assistance with their PhD applications.
2024-2025
Peer Mentor
Chicago-Booth Finance Department
Met with first-year PhD student regularly to offer advice and guidance on coursework, research, choosing advisors, and more.
2024-2025
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