Style investing and firm innovation

We document that transient, dedicated and quasi-indexed institutional investors exhibit a high degree of within-group heterogeneity with respect to their investment styles (i.e., growth, value, and balanced). We find that growth institutional investors enhance firm innovation in terms of R&D expenditures, R&D intensity, quantity and quality of patents and patent radicalness while value institutional investors impede innovation. Balanced investors have no significant association with innovation. Findings are consistent with style investing literature that growth and value styles are substitutes. Using investment styles, we present evidence that reconcile literature’s mixed findings on how transient and dedicated investors affect R&D and innovation, and why quasi-indexed investors, the largest group among all investors, have an insignificant effect. We also show that the effect of institutional investors depends on the firm’s relative level of innovativeness.     

Employee treatment and firm innovation

We identify firm innovation as a channel through which the treatment of employees affects firm value. Long‐term incentive theory supports positive effects of ‘good’ employee treatment on innovation. Alternatively, entrenchment theory suggests such treatment will lead to complacency and shirking, hence deterring innovation. These opposing views merit investigation since human capital is increasingly essential to the growth and success of a firm. Using the KLD database and patent/citation data, we find a significant positive relationship between favorable employee treatment and the innovation quantity and quality of a firm. Furthermore, we find that the positive treatment of employees improves innovation focus – more innovation related to firms’ core business, leading to greater firm value via the increased economic value of patents. These findings, robust to endogeneity concerns, provide support for the long‐term incentive hypothesis, suggesting that well‐treated employees increase firm innovation. Thus, firm innovation represents a channel through which positive employee treatment enhances firm value.     

CEO tenure,the risk of termination and firm value

We examine CEOs' risk of termination, its determinants and its effect on firm value. Using survival analysis, we find that the risk of termination increases for about thirteen years before decreasing slightly with CEO tenure; 82% of CEOs have tenure of less than thirteen years. We also find that tenure increases with performance and compensation and decreases with monitoring by the board. Changes in the risk of termination do not have a significant effect on firm value. Taken as a whole, our results are consistent with the view that corporate governance functions reasonably well for the vast majority of firms.     

Patent rights,innovation, and firm exit

We study the causal impact of patent invalidation on subsequent innovation and exit by patent holders. The analysis uses patent litigation data from the US Federal Circuit Court and exploits random allocation of judges to control for endogeneity of the decision. Invalidation causes patent holders to reduce patenting over a five‐year window by 50% on average, but the effect is heterogeneous. The impact is large for small‐ and medium‐sized firms, particularly where they face many large competitors, and for patents central to their research portfolio. We find no significant effect for large firms. Invalidation also increases exit from patenting by small firms.     

Family involvement,family member composition and firm innovation

Based on the data of Chinese listed family firms from 2008 to 2016, we investigate the impact of family involvement on firm innovation and the moderating effect of family member composition. The results show that increased family involvement significantly reduces R&D investment intensity and the number of patent applications. With the increased richness of the kinship of family members involved in management, the negative impact of family involvement on patent applications is weakened, but family member composition does not have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between family involvement and R&D investment intensity. Further analysis shows that the number of invention patent applications decreases as the degree of family involvement increases, but family involvement has no significant effect on utility model patent and design patent applications. Family member composition has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between family involvement and invention patent applications. The results have value as a reference for exploring how family involvement affects firm innovation and can also help the actual controller to take effective measures to optimize family member composition and improve the innovation performance of family firms.     

Financial development,government ownership of banks and firm innovation

Using a newly-available World Bank survey of over 28,000 firms from 46 countries, we examine how financial development affects firm innovation around the world. We find that while stock market development significantly enhances firm innovation, banking sector development has mixed effects. We show that the latter result can be explained by different levels of government ownership of banks. Specifically, in countries with lower government ownership of banks, banking sector development significantly enhances firm innovation; while in countries with higher government ownership of banks, banking sector development has no significant or sometimes even significantly negative effects on firm innovation. Such negative effects are significantly stronger for smaller firms. The results are robust to various controls such as firms’ human capital and ownership structure, to estimations using instrumental variable techniques and alternative measures of firm innovation.     

Institutional investor networks and firm innovation: Evidence from China

We examine the impact of institutional investor networks on firm innovation in China. Employing the unexpected departure of mutual fund managers and the inclusion of the Shanghai-Shenzhen 300 index as identifications, we find that institutional investor networks have a positive impact on firm innovation. Specifically, firms that are hold by well-connected institutional investors are motivated to make R&D investments and receive greater patents than their counterparts. This positive influence is more pronounced for non-SOEs and for firms located in less-developed regions, indicating that institutional investor networks act as information flow facilitator and a value certifier to encourage innovation activities.     

Feeling right at home: Hometown CEOs and firm innovation

Extending the theories of social and place identity, we predict that CEO hometown identity has a positive and significant influence on firm innovation. Our empirical evidence, from publicly traded firms in China during 2002–2016, suggests that a firm whose CEO's hometown is in the same province or city as the firm's headquarters tends to invest more in R&D and generate more patent applications. Our results are robust to the firm fixed effects and we use difference-in-differences analysis and instrument variable regressions to mitigate endogeneity concerns. CEOs' hometown identity still has a strong and positive impact on innovation after we control for measures of social capital of CEOs. We identify the mechanisms behind the positive relation between firm innovation and CEO hometown identity: hometown CEOs enjoy more support from the board of directors, they are more willing to take risks, and they are more likely to have long-term visions.     

Innovation beyond firm boundaries: Strategic alliances and corporate innovation

In this paper, we empirically analyze how strategic alliances affect the innovation output of the firms forming the alliance. We find a positive effect of R&D-related strategic alliances on corporate innovation, as measured by the quantity and quality of patents filed. This effect is stronger for firms led by CEOs with higher general managerial skills, firms with greater experience from earlier alliances, and firms operating in R&D-intensive industries. Furthermore, the innovation-fostering effect of strategic alliances is more pronounced if alliance partnering firms share a common institutional blockholder or have a higher degree of technological proximity. We also document, for the first time in the literature, a unique contractual mechanism through which firms share the benefits of innovation with their alliance partners, namely, “co-patenting.”     

Carrying on the family's legacy: Male heirs and firm innovation

We predict that entrepreneurs are more likely to have a long-term orientation to their decision making if they have male heirs, because traditionally sons, not daughters, have been expected to carry on the family business. Our results support this prediction. Specifically, we find that when entrepreneurs have at least one son, have more sons, and have a firstborn son, their firms are more innovative. The results are robust to a battery of robustness tests, including alternative measures of innovation, instrumental variable approach, and Heckman two-step correction for selection bias. Our further analyses show that the positive association between male heirs and firm innovation is stronger for entrepreneurs with a greater son preference and is weaker for entrepreneurs who more impacted by the one-child policy.     

Reverse innovation and firm value in emerging markets: Evidence from China

Reverse innovation (RI) patents, which apply to intellectual property that is created in an emerging country but patented in a developed country, are better representatives of innovation value than domestic patents in emerging economies. We argue that RI patents contribute to firm value by proxying for the private value of innovation, generating product market value, and signalling firms’ capabilities. Using a sample of Chinese-listed companies, we find RI patents positively relate to firms’ short- and long-term market value. This effect is stronger for firms with high innovative intensity and managerial ability. We also explore the mechanisms behind the relationship between RI and firm value. We demonstrate that, in addition to the domestic patent functions of creating value and capturing innovation rent, RI patents can further leverage firm value by signalling firm quality to customers and investors in developed markets, a function that is unique to RI patents.     

The undesirable effect of audit quality: Evidence from firm innovation

This study examines whether and how audit quality affects a firm's technological innovation. Using a sample of 7,482 U.S. firms between 2000 and 2009, we demonstrate that high audit quality is associated with lower innovation output, measured by patent counts and patent citations. The effect remains valid after a series of tests for endogeneity issues, alternative measures of audit quality, and different subsamples. We also find that firms with high audit quality attract more non-dedicated institutional investors and financial analysts, who often exert excessive pressure on managers for short-term performance. These pressures, in turn, exacerbate managerial myopia and lead them to forgo investments in innovation. Our findings provide new insights into audit quality by showing its undesirable, most likely unintended, consequences.     

Integrating corporate social responsibility criteria into executive compensation and firm innovation: International evidence

Using a large sample of firms from 30 countries, we find that the integration of corporate social responsibility (CSR) criteria into executive compensation is associated with greater innovation output in countries around the world. We also find that this positive association is stronger in countries with weak stakeholder orientation, countries with weak legal environments, and countries without mandatory CSR reporting requirements. These findings suggest that CSR contracting can compensate for institutional voids and high stakeholder demand for CSR, and thereby foster firm innovation. The results of the channel analyses suggest that a greater level of employee innovation productivity, enhanced managerial risk-taking, and greater responsiveness of firms' R&D investment to their investment opportunities play a significant role in the association between CSR contracting and innovation. Overall, our study demonstrates in a global context the importance of linking executive compensation to nonfinancial criteria in addition to financial criteria, and it documents the heterogeneity in the effect of CSR contracting on firm innovation in different countries.     

The bright side of co‐opted boards: Evidence from firm innovation

This study documents a positive and robust effect of co‐opted boards on firm innovation. This effect is mainly driven by co‐opted independent directors. Firms with more co‐opted independent directors are associated with lower sensitivities of CEO pay and turnover to performance. It suggests that co‐opted boards promote innovation by insulating managers’ career concerns from innovation risk and supporting incentive contracts that motivate innovation. Overall, our study provides new evidence on co‐opted boards benefiting firm innovation.     

Can digital innovation improve firm performance: Evidence from digital patents of Chinese listed firms

Within the context of the digital economy, digital innovation has emerged as a significance driving force to enhance firm value. This paper uses the A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2016 to 2021 as a sample to test the impact of digital innovation on corporate performance and its mechanism. We find that digital innovation can positively improve firm performance by improving labor productivity, reducing operating costs and enhancing competitive advantage. Further research shows that digital innovation is more likely to improve firm performance in high-market, large-scale, state-owned enterprises and regions with high marketization. Digital industrialization can strengthen the positive correlation between digital innovation and firm performance. Industries involved of digital product manufacturing and digital technology application play a greater role in the economic effect of digital innovation. Finally, location-oriented policies promote digital innovation. This paper contributes to the research on the measurement of digital innovation and its economic consequences, constructs a framework for the impact of digital innovation on the economic effect of microenterprises, and provides reliable empirical evidence for the development of digital innovation.     

Eco-efficiency and firm value

Eco-efficiency refers to a process that seeks to maximize the effectiveness of business processes while minimizing their impacts on the environment. Fundamental to eco-efficiency is adoption of a management philosophy that stimulates the search for environmental improvements that yield parallel economic benefits [President’s Council on Sustainable Development, 1996a. Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment. Government Printing Office, Washington DC; President’s Council on Sustainable Development, 1996b. Eco-efficiency: Task Force Report. Government Printing Office, Washington DC; World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), 2000. Eco-efficiency: Creating More Value with Less Input. Geneva]. Eco-efficiency is increased by activities that create economic value while continuously reducing ecological impacts and the use of natural resources [DeSimone, L., Popoff, F., 1997. Eco-efficiency: The Business Link To Sustainable Development. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA]. This study empirically examines the proposition that implementation of eco-efficient business strategies is associated with higher firm value. We posit that, firms which adopt eco-efficient business strategies and, as a consequence, achieve reduced costs and increased profits should be more highly valued by the market than similar firms that do not adopt eco-efficient business strategies. Our empirical testing supports this proposition.     

Beta and firm age

We document a robust pattern of beta declining over the age of a firm. We find that changes in systematic risk via firm characteristics and life-cycle stages are insufficient to explain this pattern. Moreover, standard proxies for the quantity and quality of information also explain this pattern only partially. To fully explain this pattern we rely on the increasingly important role of familiarity in financial decision making: familiarity is a determinant of beta and firm age is a proxy for the degree of familiarity that investors feel toward individual stocks. To illustrate the implication of our findings, we document that when we control for firm age there is support for the CAPM and its use as an input for the cost of equity capital calculation.     

Internationalization and firm performance

We argue that industry competition and industry innovation intensity exert an influence on the relation between a firm's internationalization and performance. Using a large panel sample consisting of publicly listed nonfinancial firms in 27 European countries from 1990 to 2016, we document that internationalization is negatively associated with operating performance and firm value. The negative effects of internationalization on operating performance and firm value vary depending on the degree of industry competition or industry innovation intensity. These results imply that industry conditions moderate the effects of internationalization on operating performance and firm value.     

Equilibrium matching and termination

In an equilibrium model of the labor market with moral hazard, jobs are dynamic contracts, job separations are terminations of optimal dynamic contracts. Transitions from unemployment to new jobs are modeled as a process of random matching and Nash bargaining. Non-employed workers make consumption and saving decisions as in a standard growth model, as well as whether or not to participate in the labor market. The stationary equilibrium is characterized. The model is then calibrated to the U.S. labor market to study quantitatively the worker flows and distributions, the compensation dynamics, and the effects of UI system.     

Cost of government and firm value

Do high expenditures incurred in running the government benefit or hurt firms? Using Chinese data between 1999 and 2006, we find that higher administrative expenditures in provincial governments are associated with lower firm value, lower stock and financial performance, and lower labor productivity. Local governments that spend more on public administration tend to collect more fees from companies and spend less on social welfare and infrastructures. Our evidence is consistent with the “grabbing hand” hypothesis and has important policy implications.