Geopolitical Disruption and Creativity: Evidence from War-struck Artists during World War II

Creativity, a core micro-foundation of innovation, accompanies challenges in its pursuit because novel ideas or products can create friction with pre-existing standards or traditions. In addressing this dilemma, research has primarily focused on the strategies that enhance the receptivity of creativity in a given normative context. However, norms are rarely permanent. In the face of geopolitical disruptions, such as wars, established structures and standards are fragmented, eroding the traditional normative boundaries that typically constrain creativity. This norm erosion creates a space where individuals are no longer bound by conventional limitations, which may offer a unique opportunity to explore new configurations for creativity. I test this conjecture by exploiting the timing of German invasions of European countries during World War II and examining whether these invasions affected the creativity of war-afflicted painters. To delve into the multidimensional nature of creativity in this artistic context, I employ image processing techniques on over 39,000 paintings, extracting core creative dimensions of paintings such as color spectrums, brushstroke patterns, and overall structural features. I find a dual-faced effect of war: afflicted artists experience temporary drops in creative output, but they also produce more novel artworks by combining different features that push the boundaries of the artistic paradigm. The novel paintings produced by the war-afflicted artists were subsequently more likely to be exhibited in the top galleries around the world. I discuss implications for creativity and innovation research.

Border Disruption and Innovation with Beth Simmons

Borders have resurfaced as important instruments of state power, with implications that extend beyond restrictions on mobility. This paper examines how physical border hardening affects inventive activity through a symbolic channel: as a visible representation of separation, exclusion, and social boundaries. Drawing on research on innovation, we argue that physical borders erode contextual foundations that facilitate exploratory search and unconventional knowledge combinations. Using geospatial variation in filtering infrastructure across U.S. counties bordering Canada and Mexico from 1993 to 2020, combined with inventor-level patent data, we document that border hardening reduces the recombinative novelty of innovation. This decline is concentrated along the Southern border, with no comparable effect along the Northern border. Heterogeneity analyses show that the decline in novelty is largest among inventors at foreign firms and among minority inventors, especially Hispanic inventors. The results are robust to alternative measures of hardening, including staggered border wall construction, and to a text-based measure of patent novelty. These findings show that borders have consequences beyond their typical framing in terms of mobility, security, and trade. Through symbolic mechanisms, border hardening can constrain novel ideas and reproduce inequality in innovation, with unforeseen long-term economic and societal costs.

Sanctions and Firm Overcompliance: Evidence from North Korean Nuclear Tests with Robin Wang

In the face of major geopolitical disruptions, firms must interpret and respond to rapidly shifting state political stances under uncertainty. This study examines how firms’ political standing shapes their compliance behavior following severe geopolitical shocks. Using comprehensive monthly firm–product-level trade data covering the universe of Chinese exporters and exploiting North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test as an exogenous shock, we analyze how firms adjust cross-border trade amid heightened geopolitical tension. We find that aggregate trade declines sharply following the shock, but this contraction is driven almost entirely by firms with weaker political standing, whereas politically connected firms maintain relatively stable trade relationships. To distinguish formal compliance from precautionary withdrawal, we use textual matching of UN sanctions documents to detailed product descriptions, allowing us to identify products explicitly targeted by international restrictions. Firms with weaker political standing reduce exports not only in sanctioned categories but also in legally permissible and humanitarian goods, revealing substantial overcompliance beyond formal restrictions. These findings highlight how political standing shapes firms’ interpretation of geopolitical risk and demonstrate how heterogeneous compliance responses can transmit political shocks into unintended economic and welfare consequences.

Global Impact of Policy Reform during Vatican II with Donal Crilly

In a linguistically diverse world, organizations often accommodate local languages to facilitate communication and support localization. Challenging this prevailing assumption, we develop a competing identity-symbolic perspective, which suggests that language accommodation may instead weaken adherence when an established language has become integral to an organization’s identity and distinctiveness. We examine these competing predictions in the context of the Catholic Church’s language reform during the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which permitted vernacular languages to replace Latin in the liturgy. Using retrospective survey data, we find that Catholic attendance declined more sharply after the reform in countries whose languages were more distant from Latin, precisely those countries in which the reform was intended to strengthen adherence. This negative relationship was stronger where Protestantism was more prevalent, consistent with the argument that adopting vernacular languages weakened a symbolic boundary that had distinguished Catholicism from its primary religious alternative. These findings introduce an identity-symbolic perspective on language and identify a trade-off between localization and organizational distinctiveness. They suggest that accommodating local languages can improve accessibility while simultaneously weakening the symbolic meanings through which stakeholders recognize and differentiate an organization 

Mobility Disruption and Employee Visibility Reduction with Olenka Kacperczyk

Retaining valuable human capital is central to a firm’s competitive advantage. While most studies have focused on strategies that constrain employees’ pursuit of outside options, surprisingly little research considered strategies that constrain competitors’ provision of outside options. In this study, we propose that when faced with the threat of human capital loss, firms will strategically reduce employees’ visibility in the external labor market to limit the outside options. We test our predictions in the mutual fund industry, exploiting exogenous state-level variation in the enforcement of non-compete agreements which indicates barriers to interfirm mobility. We find support for our predictions using difference-in-differences estimators that leverage non-compete abandonments and adoptions. Our study contributes to theories of retention and research on strategic human capital more broadly. 

Time and Financial and Social Returns with Donal Crilly & Cedric Gutierrez

Firms increasingly integrate social and environmental objectives with financial goals, yet achieving financial profitability and social outcomes takes time. This creates challenges for organizations facing investor pressure for short-term returns. Existing research primarily frames investor impatience as uniform and focused on financial outcomes. We introduce the concept of dual impact patience, suggesting that investor short-termism is multidimensional, varying between financial and social domains and shaped by their interaction. Across three studies—a within-subject experiment, crowdfunding data analysis, and a policy-capturing study—we find that investors exhibit greater patience for social returns, while remaining more sensitive to financial return timelines. The interplay between objectives is critical: near-term financial returns can mitigate concerns about distant social goals. By revealing the domain-specific nature of short-termism, we advance understanding of investor short-termism, offering insights for managers in aligning capital allocation with societal impact. 

Intertemporal Discounting in the Afterlife with Donal Crilly & Anna Szerb

Many challenges that organizations face require initiatives that reach into the distant future and extend beyond conventional strategic planning horizons. The fact that leaders and their stakeholders potentially care about the well-being of society very far into the future, perhaps even after their demise, is a puzzle for research on intertemporality. This study extends the theories of intertemporal discounting beyond the timeframe of one's mortality. We find that the degree of temporal discounting reverses when the returns are materialized surely after one's death, especially when the individual is reminded of the collective afterlife (the life of people on earth after one's demise), compared to individual afterlife (the afterlife state of oneself).