Yifan Tian

I am a scholar of innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship. My dissertation 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. It 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 mass layoffs 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.
 

I am currently on the job market.

JOB MARKET PAPER

The Shattered Career: How Job Displacement Channels High Performers Away from Productivity

This paper examines whether and how performance is portable by studying the effects of job displacement on inventors’ productivity. Theories disagree on the extent to which human capital is portable, and findings are mixed partly because most research focuses on voluntary mobility, where moves are endogenous to portability. To mitigate this limitation, I analyze job displacement, a form of involuntary mobility, through a comparison of displaced and non-displaced inventors in the U.S. ICT industry. Results show that displacement significantly reduces productivity, with the negative effects concentrated among high performers. This decline reflects both the loss of job-specific human capital and role shifts that move high performers from invention into management. The findings demonstrate that performance portability is contingent on mobility type and career paths, advancing strategic human capital research on mobility and reallocation.

WORKING PAPERS

• Uncommon Knowledge Combinations in Startups and the Impacts on Startup Performance (with Stefano Breschi)
• Knowledge in Multi-Location Firms: Exploration, Internal Exploitation, and Integration (with Stefano Breschi)

WORK IN PROGRESS

• Lobbying and Innovation (with Nilanjana Dutt and Felix Poege)