The risk-reward nexus in the innovation-inequality relationship: who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards?
Open accessAbstract
We present a framework, called the Risk-Reward Nexus, to study the relationship between innovation and inequality. We ask the following question: What types of economic actors (workers, taxpayers, shareholders) make contributions of effort and money to the innovation process for the sake of future, inherently uncertain, returns? Are these the same types of economic actors who are able to appropriate returns from the innovation process if and when they appear? That is, who takes the risks and who gets the rewards? We argue that it is the collective, cumulative, and uncertain characteristics of the innovation process that make this disconnect between risks and rewards possible. We conclude by sketching out key policy implications of the Risk-Reward Nexus approach.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
An understanding of how different actors contribute to the creation of new markets and new rents and how they are rewarded-the risk-reward nexus-is often missing from today's discussions.
“What is often missing from today's discussions is an understanding of how different actors in the economy contribute to the creation of new markets and new rents and then how those actors are rewarded for their contributions-the 'risk-reward nexus' of the capitalist system (Lazonick and Mazzucato, 2013).”
From Mapping modern economic rents: the good, the bad, and the grey areas (2023) · cites this paper as Lazonick and Mazzucato, 2013
Cites
Maximizing shareholder value: a new ideology for corporate governance
Lazonick, W., & O'Sullivan, M. (2000) · Economy and Society · doi:10.1080/030851400360541 · Cited by 1,970 · see citing works
Self-citationInequality and Economic Growth: The Perspective of the New Growth Theories
Aghion, P., Caroli, E., & García-Peñalosa, C. (1999) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.37.4.1615 · Cited by 1,848 · see citing works
Technical change, inequality, and the labor market
Acemoglu, D. (2002) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.40.1.7 · Cited by 1,767 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Mapping modern economic rents: the good, the bad, and the grey areas
Mazzucato, M., Ryan-Collins, J., & Gouzoulis, G. (2023) · Cambridge Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/cje/bead013 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
Self-citationHow venture capitalists decide which new medical technologies come to exist
Lehoux, P., Miller, F. A., Daudelin, G., & Urbach, D. R. (2016) · Science and Public Policy · doi:10.1093/scipol/scv051 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
- Authors
- Lazonick, W., & Mazzucato, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Massachusetts Lowell (US)
- University of Sussex (GB)
- Venue
- Industrial and Corporate Change
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2013-07-25
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1093-1128
- ISSN
- 0960-6491 (ISSN-L)
- 1464-3650
- OpenAlex
- W2128802209
- Cited by
- 284
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 56 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 20 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 19 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 39.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- figshare.com
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Industrial and Corporate Change (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic Theory and Institutions
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Firm Innovation and Growth
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economic Theory and Policy
- Keywords
- innovation, inequality, innovation risk, economic agents, cumulative innovation, uncertainty, innovation policy, workers, taxpayers, shareholders
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
