Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or "patent racing," has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world. It reveals that patent races are common, particularly in information-technology fields. The analysis is then extended to get the causal impact of winning a patent race, using a regression-discontinuity approach. It shows that patent race winners do significantly more follow-on innovation, and the follow-on research that they do is more similar to what was covered by the patent.

Tymen deJong, First Solar's senior vice president of module manufacturing, fixated yet again on the company's latest 10-K. DeJong had joined the company in January of 2010, at a time when First Solar's future appeared bright. Now, just two years later, First Solar's cost advantage was eroding, and deJong was facing challenges that would require tough decisions.

A growing body of literature finds that a healthy corporate culture is associated with superior financial performance. A separate stream of research has found that a firm's adoption of management "best practices" is correlated with higher efficiency and productivity. To date, the cultural and management practices literatures have proceeded in parallel, with few studies considering the relationship between an organization's processes and its culture. This paper uses data from a carefully-designed survey of 370 organizations and nearly ten thousand managers to simultaneously measure corporate culture and management practices. Our key finding is that the quality of a company's management practices and health of its corporate culture are highly correlated. This implies that studies which measure either culture or processes in isolation are likely to overstate their impact on performance. We also provide suggestive evidence that management practices may cause changes in corporate culture, or at least that this effect is stronger than the reverse.