This article explores the relationship between a firm’s legal contracting environment and its innovation incentives. Using granular data from the pharmaceutical industry, we examine a contracting mechanism through which incumbents maintain market power: “pay-for-delay” agreements to delay the market entry of competitors. Exploiting a shock where such contracts become legally tenuous, we find that affected incumbents subsequently increase their innovation activity across a variety of project-level measures. Exploring the nature of this innovation, we also find that it is more “impactful” from a scientific and commercial standpoint. The results provide novel evidence that restricting the contracting space can boost innovation at the firm level. However, at the extensive margin we find a reduction in innovation by new entrants in response to increased competition, suggesting a nuanced effect on aggregate innovation

This paper explores how a prominent place-based policy in China, the national high-tech zones, affects local innovation output and entrepreneurial activities. Making use of staggered establishments of national high-tech zones in various Chinese cities, we find that the establishment of national high-tech zones has positive effects on local innovation output and entrepreneurial activities. A number of additional tests suggest that the effects appear causal. Access to finance, reductions in administrative burdens, and talent cultivation are three plausible underlying economic channels. Our paper sheds new light on the evaluation of the effectiveness of China’s place-based policies

I examine the role of banking competition for transmission of incentives to the creation of innovative firms. Exploiting the 2012 Start-Up Italy Act, designed to foster firm creation through public bank guarantees, I document that the policy increased the creation of innovative firms by 24 percent between 2012 and 2015, but only in provinces where banking competition is stronger. Weaker banking competition leads to less guaranteed lending, fewer venture capital deals and lower leverage for these firms, resulting in higher entrepreneurial migration. The findings suggest that bank market power plays a crucial role in shaping the market for entrepreneurial finance

This article documents the existence of an intensive margin of the gender gap in innovative entrepreneurship. Not only there are fewer women than men who become entrepreneurs, but female entrepreneurs also hold smaller equity stakes, make less substantial investments, and are less frequently appointed as firm executives compared to their male counterparts. Leveraging the context of emergency contraception deregulation in Italy and varying abortion service accessibility, I find that mitigating maternity risk narrows these gaps. Consequently, female-led firms become riskier and more attractive to venture capital investors during their early stages

We rely on a model with incomplete contracts and bargaining power to argue that trade credit (TC) can serve as a commitment device for making relationship-specific investments (RSIs). Unlike existing theories, we explain within a single theoretical framework why TC is affected by firms’ bargaining power and by the specialized nature of transacted goods. Using a large panel of publicly listed firms and innovation-based proxies for RSI, we find strong support for the model’s predictions: TC increases in upstream firm’s RSI and downstream firm’s market power. Endogeneity concerns are addressed by using the passage of innovation-increasing state laws to instrument for RSI and import penetration to instrument for bargaining power

This paper studies an economy in which firms can operate either a mature or a new technology and lenders acquire information on the productive assets of the borrowing firms that are eligible as collateral. We demonstrate that when contracts are imperfectly enforceable informed lenders offer inexpensive funding for the mature technology but may choose not to finance the new one, seeking to preserve the value of their information on the mature assets. Using firm-level data from Italy, we find that banks that establish long-term relationships with firms promote technological progress on average. However, we find that relationship banks inhibit innovations that entail a large depreciation of existing technology-specific information such as radical innovations

We find the confluence of CEO-same industry experience makes independent directors particularly helpful in enhancing value-added growth and we identify a channel: guidance toward higher value-added R&D investments and higher quality innovations. Further corroborating these inferences, we find greater improvement in value-added growth when (1) independent directors with industry–CEO experience (IDICEs) have experience in more similar industries; (2) they create more shareholder value as CEO; and (3) they are current CEOs. In addition, IDICEs contribute to value-added growth most when firm environments and characteristics are conducive for active board-management interaction; namely, when product markets are more competitive and dynamic, when outsiders can more easily acquire firm-specific information, and when firms are younger and smaller. Consistent with our inferences on how IDICEs contribute to value-added growth, firms growing faster, less successfully innovating, and/or under strong governance tend to be matched with IDICEs

This article examines competition and investor behavior in the mutual fund industry for the universe of US mutual funds during 1976–2009. Over this period, industry assets increased by a factor of 200, the number of active fund families quadrupled, and the average market share of a family declined by four-fifths. We find that price competition and product differentiation are both effective strategies in obtaining market share. Families that pass along economies of scale to investors and those that charge lower fees than the competition gain market share, but only if these fees are above average to begin with. Loads and 12b-1 fees, however, have a positive effect on market share, consistent with the use of these types of fees for marketing and distribution. Families that perform better, offer a wider range of products, and start more funds relative to the competition (a measure of innovation) also have a higher market share. Innovation is rewarded more if the new fund is more differentiated from existing offerings. Overall, our evidence suggests that mutual fund families compete effectively along both price and non-price dimensions

This paper shows that the stock market misprices firms’ investment options. We build a real options model of optimal investment under uncertainty to estimate the value of firms’ investment options. We show that firms with valuable investment options have a higher likelihood of being mispriced. Importantly, this mispricing is not one-sided, as such firms are equally likely to be undervalued or overvalued. Our paper adds to the debate on whether public equity markets are myopic and systematically undervalue innovative firms. We show that this is not necessarily the case

Large U.S. banks dramatically increased their capitalization during the 1990s, to the highest levels in more than 50 years. We document this buildup of capital and evaluate several potential motivations. Our results support the hypothesis that regulatory innovations in the early 1990s weakened conjectural government guarantees and enhanced bank counterparties' incentives to monitor and price default risk. We find no evidence that a bank holding company's (BHC's) market capitalization increases with its asset volatility prior to 1994. Thereafter, the data display a strong cross-sectional relation between capitalization and asset risk