Labor Mobility in the Disk Drive Industry:Do Pioneering Firms Attract More Inventive Employees?

This thesis studies the causal relationship between shakeout periods and labor mobility. Two previously existing datasets containing patent-, inventor- and company-level observations of the disk drive industry are employed. A measure of innovative firms is created and a hypothesis formulated. The hypothesis states that inventive employees tend to move to companies that pioneer in product markets. All coefficients of the variable of interest turn out positive throughout the regressions and thus suggest the hypothesis to be true.