Essays on the Intersections of Knowledge, Organizations, and Labor Mobility

This thesis lies at the intersection of knowledge, organizational dynamics, and labor mobility, with a particular focus on the factors that shape knowledge creation and diffusion, as well as the influence of knowledge on entrepreneurial and innovative performance. Chapter One (the job market paper) explores the effects of involuntary employee mobility on knowledge productivity. The findings show that when inventors move involuntarily from a source firm to a destination firm, their post-mobility productivity significantly declines. However, maintaining prior co-inventor relationships mitigates this negative impact. In contrast, moving to a firm with greater resources does not yield a statistically significant improvement in productivity outcomes. Chapter Two shifts the unit of analysis from individuals to firms, investigating how uncommon knowledge combinations among founding teams affect entrepreneurial outcomes. The analysis demonstrates that startups with founder teams possessing more uncommon knowledge pairings are more likely to experience extreme outcomes, either notable market success or failure. While these uncommon combinations increase attractiveness to venture capitalists and facilitate early growth, they also lead startups to pursue multiple, less familiar market opportunities, thereby elevating the risk of failure. Chapter Three transitions from startups to incumbent firms, examining knowledge diffusion within multi-clustered organizations. The results highlight a positive relationship between geographical dispersion and the quantity, diffusion, and exploitation of explo- rative patents. However, pre-existing co-patenting relationships between clusters significantly constrain knowledge diffusion and exploitation. This thesis contributes to the literature on strategic human capital, entrepreneurship, and innovation by underscoring the critical role of knowledge as a key form of human capital influencing firm performance. It extends the body of research on the portability of human capital across firms by differentiating the effects of involuntary mobility from those of other causes. Beyond employee-driven knowledge transfer, this work also enriches the understanding of founder team composition, intra-firm knowledge diffusion, and their influences on organizational performance.