Rembrand M. Koning

Rembrand M. Koning

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Rembrand Koning is an assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy unit. His research examines how business ecosystems depend on the distribution of knowledge, technology, and people across firms. Central to his work is the use of field experiments and representative within-firm data to test how companies and entrepreneurs can best leverage diversity, digital tools, and social learning to increase growth and innovation. He teaches the Strategy course in the first-year MBA curriculum.

His work has been published in Organization Science and the American Sociological Review. Professor Koning earned his PhD in business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. Prior to his graduate studies, he was a research coordinator at Columbia Business School. He graduated from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.

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Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation

Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between-area, between-establishment, and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more- and less-homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses intently on within-firm processes. By doing so, we may be overstating what progress has been made on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.

Learning to Manage

A field experiment in the Indian startup ecosystem

While management styles and practices have been found to be important determinants of firm performance, there is far less evidence on the extent to which management matters for entrepreneurial ventures and whether founders can learn to be more effective managers. Using a randomized field experiment with 100 high-growth technology firms, we show that founders who received advice from other founders with more “hands-on” management styles were more likely to reorient their own management activity, and subsequently experience lower employee attrition and higher rates of firm survival eight months after the intervention. For founders who already had a more hands-on management style themselves, these interactions also increased their rate of hiring. Our study demonstrates management skill can be learned by young firms via networks and subsequently influence performance.

When Proximity May Not Be Destiny

The Role of Existing Relationships

Research on geography and knowledge spillovers is premised on the proposition that proximity reduces the cost of search and coordination. Thus, learning from proximate parties is easier than from more distant ones. As a consequence, nearby individuals, teams, and firms share overlapping knowledge and correlated outcomes. In this paper we theorize that spatial spillovers fundamentally depend on the presence of existing relationships. Using multi-dimensional network formation data from the random placement of teams at a startup bootcamp, we show that spatial spillovers decline if team members have existing ties within a particular social setting. For teams with preexisting ties within the bootcamp, localized spillovers appear small or non-existent. For teams without preexisting ties we find that outcomes improve if neighbors are high performing, but that outcomes worsen if neighboring teams are low performing. Our findings suggest that existing relationships do affect spillovers, primarily by capping downsides, but also by limiting the upsides of being near a high-performing team.

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