We examine how increasing execution costs in existing inventor collaborations affect inventive outcomes, using the 2016 Zika virus outbreak in Florida as an exogenous shock. The outbreak elevated the perceived travel risks for female inventors collaborating with Florida-based partners, thus increasing their execution costs. We argue that higher execution costs induce affected inventors to reduce or discontinue lower-value collaborations and potentially seek new collaborators as substitutes. Leveraging inventor–patent–time data, we implement a difference-in-differences framework comparing female vs male inventors who work with Florida, supplemented by a triple-difference design using collaborations outside Florida as a placebo comparison. Our findings confirm that female inventors with Florida collaborators reduce collaborative activity with Florida more than male inventors post-outbreak, particularly in projects of lower expected value (as measured by forward citations). We also document that, when these low-value collaborations are dropped, female inventors tend to form new alliances with previously unconnected partners, offsetting some loss in overall collaboration. The net effect appears to be a rise in the average quality of patents produced, suggesting that disruptions in existing relationships can promote selective filtering of collaborations and motivate more productive partnerships. We observe only modest changes in total patent counts, indicating that gains in average quality may come at limited cost to overall output.
