Fund for financial assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Organization capital is a production factor that is embodied in the firm's key talent and has an efficiency that is firm specific. Hence, both shareholders and key talent have a claim to its cash flows. We develop a model in which the outside option of the key talent determines the share of firm cash flows that accrue to shareholders. This outside option varies systematically and renders firms with high organization capital riskier from shareholders' perspective. We find that firms with more organization capital have average returns that are 4.6% higher than firms with less organization capital.

We propose a new measure of the economic importance of each innovation. Our measure uses newly collected data on patents issued to U.S. firms in the 1926 to 2010 period, combined with the stock market response to news about patents. Our patent-level estimates of private economic value are positively related to the scientific value of these patents, as measured by the number of citations the patent receives in the future. Our new measure is associated with substantial growth, reallocation, and creative destruction, consistent with the predictions of Schumpeterian growth models. Aggregating our measure suggests that technological innovation accounts for significant medium-run fluctuations in aggregate economic growth and TFP. Our measure contains additional information relative to citation-weighted patent counts; the relation between our measure and firm growth is considerably stronger. Importantly, the degree of creative destruction that is associated with our measure is higher than previous estimates, confirming that it is a useful proxy for the private valuation of patents.

We document a significant negative effect of idiosyncratic stock-return volatility on investment. We address the endogeneity problem of stock return volatility by instrumenting for volatility with a measure of a firm's customer base concentration. We propose that the negative effect of idiosyncratic risk on investment is partly due to managerial risk aversion, and find that the negative relationship between idiosyncratic uncertainty and investment is stronger for firms with high levels of insider ownership.Several mechanisms can mitigate this effect namely the use of option-based compensation and shareholder monitoring. We find that the investment-idiosyncratic relationship is weaker for firms that make use of option-based compensation, and insider ownership does not matter for firms primarily held by institutional investors. * Federal Reserve Board, vasia.panousi@frb.gov, and Kellogg School of Management, d-papanikolaou @kel-logg.northwestern.edu. We would like to thank

We thank Carola Frydman for helpful comments and discussions. We are grateful to Nathaniel Barlow and Jorge Colmenares-Miralles for excellent research assistance and Evan Soltas, SafeGraph, and the Risk Management Institute (RMI) of the National University of Singapore for sharing their data. Please see https://sites.google.com/site/lawrencedwschmidt/covid19 for additional information and data related to the analysis conducted in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

I explore the implications for asset prices and macroeconomic dynamics of shocks that improve real investment opportunities and thus affect the representative household’s marginal utility. These investment shocks generate differences in risk premia due to their heterogeneous impact on firms: they benefit firms producing investment relative to firms producing consumption goods and increase the value of growth opportunities relative to the value of existing assets. Using data on asset returns, I find that a positive investment shock leads to high marginal utility states. A general equilibrium model with investment shocks matches key features of macroeconomic quantities and asset prices.

We provide a unified explanation for several apparent anomalies in the cross-section of asset returns, namely the failure of the CAPM to account for the cross-sectional relation between average stock returns and firm valuation ratios, past investment, profitability, market beta, or idiosyncratic volatility. Using a calibrated structural model, we argue that these characteristics are imperfect proxies for the share of growth opportunities to firm value, which determines firms' exposures to capital-embodied shocks, and risk premia. Return differences among firms sorted on the above characteristics are largely driven by the same systematic factor related to embodied technology shocks. * MIT Sloan School of Management and NBER, lkogan@mit.edu † Kellogg School of Management and NBER, d

We use textual analysis of high-dimensional data from patent documents to create new indicators of technological innovation. We identify important patents based on textual similarity of a given patent to previous and subsequent work: these patents are distinct from previous work but related to subsequent innovations. Our importance indicators correlate with existing measures of patent quality but also provide complementary information. We identify breakthrough innovations as the most important patents—those in the right tail of our measure—and construct time series indices of technological change at the aggregate and sectoral levels. Our technology indices capture the evolution of technological waves over a long time span (1840 to the present) and cover innovation by private and public firms as well as nonprofit organizations and the US government. Advances in electricity and transportation drive the index in the 1880s, chemicals and electricity in the 1920s and 1930s, and computers and communication in the post-1980s. (JEL C43, N71, N72, O31, O33, O34)