Green technologies are imperative for green growth. We show that CEOs with more agglomeration experience are critical for opening green R&D labs that exploit potential productivity and agglomeration benefits. Using exogenous shocks to non-focal green inventor mobility surrounding a focal firm's research labs, we find that the concentration of cutting-edge green inventors improves the focal firm’s green innovation quality. Using CEOxfirm fixed effects, we identify a significant impact of CEOs' time-varying experience in agglomeration economies on lab location and innovation success through knowledge spillovers and better inventor-firm matching. Our findings suggest that insiders are key to the firm’s green innovation success.

We construct a novel measure of sectoral disruptions using a dynamic text-based spatial model of patents based on the extent to which innovation is suddenly highly correlated across multiple industries. We identify multiple sectoral disruptions occurring over a 70-year period of time. Abnormal stock returns, insider trading, and analyst forecast analysis indicate that sectoral disruptions are unexpected and create positive and long-lasting value gains. Impacted small firms (but not large firms) initially sharply increase equity issuance, reduce payouts, and increase both R&D and CAPX. In the second year after the sectoral disruptions, small firms acquire more and have growing sales, but also increase secrecy as they face increased VC-funded entry. Subsequently, acquisitions and VC activity continue to increase as corporate profits finally begin to increase with sales. These results provide a comprehensive first look at how sectoral disruptions affect firms and the industries in which they operate.

This paper identifies the reallocation of human capital as a key channel of agglomeration spillovers for innovative firms. To measure agglomeration spillovers, I study how R&D labs in different local labor markets respond differently to scientific breakthroughs, which create large and unexpected shocks to innovation productivity in certain technology categories. Taking advantage of U.S. Census longitudinal establishment data matched with patent records, I systematically locate R&D labs in all local labor markets for each firm. I document four main findings. First, following scientific breakthroughs, affected labs in thicker local labor markets (i.e., commuting zones with more inventors innovating in a certain field) produce more patents and higher-quality patents, consistent with positive agglomeration spillovers. Second, the increase in patenting is mostly attributed to new hires rather than incumbent inventors. Third, the thick labor market effect is concentrated in states and industries where there is lower enforceability of non-compete agreements and labor is more mobile. Finally, using textual analysis to identify lab-level exposure to scientific breakthroughs, I find that inventors are reallocated to labs that are more favorably affected by shocks, which helps labs in thicker labor markets to more easily bring in inventors working in the same niche fields and having a diverse knowledge base. Taken together, these results point to labor mobility as a key force in explaining why innovative firms cluster, and suggest that the clustering of firms in thick labor markets can foster corporate innovation by facilitating productivity-enhancing reallocation of human capital following scientific breakthroughs.