We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America’s most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single, large firm; we refer to such locations as “company towns.” We find that inventors employed by large firms in these locations tend to draw disproportionately from their firm’s own prior inventions...

This paper develops a simple model of the rise and fall of the large corporate lab. Large firms can either grow through internal research carried out inside their labs, or by commercializing external inventions created by start-ups. Invention by start-ups is spurred by university research. Internal research exhibits an inverted-U pattern driven by two trends: (i) the rise of university research...

Although anthropology was the first academic discipline to investigate cultural change, many other disciplines have made noteworthy contributions understanding what influences adoption of new behaviors. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary literature covering both humans and nonhumans, we examine ( a) which features behavioral traits make them more transmissible, b) individual characteristics ...

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