Scheller College of Business doctoral student Maria Roche’s research was featured in the recent article “The Particular Creativity of Dense Urban Neighborhoods” by City Lab. Roche’s research analyzed how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. She exploits a novel data set covering all Census Block Groups, which includes a small geographic area including streets, roads, railroads, streams and other physical and cultural boundaries, in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes, street infrastructure, as well as population and workforce characteristics. To deal with concerns of omitted variable bias, she applied commuting zone fixed effects and construct instruments based on historic city planning.
The results from her research suggest that variation in street network density may explain regional innovation differentials beyond the traditional location externalities found in the literature. Roche’s solo-authored paper was published in The Review of Economics and Statistics.
Alexander Oettl, associate professor of Strategy and Innovation, states, “As a doctoral student, Maria Roche has been incredibly productive in pursuing her own research topics. She has demonstrated an exceptionally high level of independence and an ability to work with scholars here at Scheller and internationally. As an example, Maria was asked to help co-organize (as the only doctoral student) a multi-division-sponsored Symposium at our field’s annual meeting with faculty from Spain and France. In addition, she has already presented her work at four international conferences. While we all hope that our the second-year paper’s of our doctoral students turn into journal-quality publications, rarely do we expect them to be solo-published in top journals.”
Maria Roche will graduate from the doctoral program this spring. She has accepted a tenure track position at Harvard Business School in the Strategy program.
Read the full article on the City Lab website here.