Essays on Entry, Competition, and Innovation

Abstract

This dissertation studies how competition, public policy, and corporate control shape innovation and investment in technology-intensive industries. The first two chapters examine U.S. broadband markets, where firms make dynamic entry, network expansion, and infrastructure upgrade decisions across spatially linked local markets while competing on prices and service quality. The third chapter studies financial innovation, asking how venture capital, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions affect patenting and technological change. The dissertation combines structural modeling, reinforcement learning, policy counterfactuals, and machine learning methods for classification, clustering, and text analysis. Chapter 1 develops a dynamic spatial model of broadband competition and shows that same-technology competition accelerates fiber expansion, induces cable quality upgrades, and raises consumer surplus through improved access and plan variety. Chapter 2 uses this framework to evaluate municipal broadband and local loop unbundling, showing that policy effects depend on private firms’ dynamic responses. Chapter 3 finds that venture capital is associated with increased financial patenting, especially in emerging technologies, and that acquisitions raise combined buyer-target patenting when they combine complementary rather than redundant technological knowledge.