This study explores the effects of judicial independence on corporate innovation by analyzing the staggered establishment of Circuit Courts in China. We find that introducing Circuit Courts increases corporate innovation, particularly for central state-owned enterprises and private firms. Channel analysis shows that Circuit Courts significantly reduce local judicial protectionism, ease financial constraints, and improve corporate governance, which stimulates innovation. The positive effects of Circuit Courts are more pronounced in cities facing severe political intervention, regions with weak legal environments, and private firms without political or banking connections. Our results are robust to endogeneity concerns, alternative measures and specification models. Overall, this study supports the theoretical arguments that institutions matter and that improvements in judicial quality boost firms' incentives to innovate

Using a difference-in-differences approach, we study how intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects innovation in China in the years around the privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Innovation increases after SOE privatizations, and this increase is larger in cities with strong IPR protection. Our results support theoretical arguments that IPR protection strengthens firms' incentives to innovate and that private sector firms are more sensitive to IPR protection than SOEs

I explore the prevalence of exchanges of innovation resources inside venture capital portfolios. I show that after companies join investors’ portfolios, several proxies of exchanges between them and portfolio companies (relative to matched nonportfolio companies) increase by an average of 60%. The increase holds when joining events are plausibly exogenous and when VCs’ bargaining power and potential conflicts of interest are low. Three novel mechanisms are supported: carve-outs, spawning, and recycling, whereby entrepreneurs divest innovation units, start new ventures, and reuse assets in other portfolio companies, respectively. Results suggest that returns to innovation are higher in venture capital portfolios

We study a setting wherein a divisional manager undertakes personally costly effort to improve the profitability of an investment project. The manager's choice of innovation effort is subject to a holdup problem because of the ex post opportunism on the part of headquarters. We analyze and contrast the performance of centralized and delegated forms of investment decision-making. We find that delegation improves the manager's innovation incentives. We identify conditions for each of the two organizational forms to emerge as the optimal choice, and relate these conditions to characteristics of firms' investment opportunity sets

This paper investigates the pricing effects of financial innovation in an economy with endogenous participation and heterogeneous income risks. The introduction of non-redundant assets endogenously modifies the participation set, reduces the covariance between dividends and participants' consumption and thus leads to lower risk premia. In multisector economies, financial innovation spreads across markets through the diversified portfolio of new entrants, and has rich effects on the cross-section of expected returns. The price changes can also lead some investors to leave the markets and give rise to non-degenerate forms of participation turnover. The model is consistent with several features of financial markets over the past few decades: substantial innovation, higher participation, significant turnover in investor composition, improved risk management practices, a slight increase in real interest rates, and a reduction in risk premia

We study the real effects on innovation of a transformative change in corporate disclosure dissemination, the implementation of the SEC’s EDGAR system. On the one hand, increased disclosure dissemination can lower firms’ cost of capital, thereby stimulating innovative activity. On the other hand, increased dissemination can exacerbate proprietary disclosure costs, reducing firms’ incentives to innovate. We show that treated firms reduce innovation investment following EDGAR’s implementation. In contrast, EDGAR reporting firms’ innovation investment cuts are met with an increase in innovation investment by their technology rivals. Consistent with an increase in proprietary costs, EDGAR-filers disclose less about their innovation activities. We also find evidence of a redistribution of innovative activity from public to private firms not subject to EDGAR disclosure requirements. Overall, our results are consistent with increased disclosure dissemination crowding out investment in innovative projects, whose returns negatively depend on information spillovers

We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an innovation-based growth model and study how income and wealth inequality affect economic growth. We identify a (positive) price effect—where increasing inequality allows innovators to charge higher prices and (negative) market-size effects—with higher inequality implying smaller markets for new goods and/or a slower transition of new goods into mass markets. It turns out that price effects dominate market-size effects. We also show that a redistribution from the poor to the rich may be Pareto improving for low levels of inequality

We propose a novel identification strategy to isolate exogenous immigration shocks across US counties, by interacting quasi-random variations in the composition of ancestry across counties with the contemporaneous inflow of migrants from different countries. We show a positive causal impact of immigration on local innovation and wages at the five-year horizon. The positive dynamic impact of immigration on innovation and wages dominates the short-run negative impact of increased labor supply. A structural estimation of a model of endogenous growth and migrations suggests the increased immigration to the United States since 1965 may have increased innovation and wages by 5 percent

We find that greater institutional ownership is associated with more innovation. To explore the mechanism, we contrast the “lazy manager” hypothesis with a model where institutional owners increase innovation incentives through reducing career risks. The evidence favors career concerns. First, we find complementarity between institutional ownership and product market competition, whereas the lazy manager hypothesis predicts substitution. Second, CEOs are less likely to be fired in the face of profit downturns when institutional ownership is higher. Finally, using instrumental variables, policy changes, and disaggregating by type of institutional owner, we argue that the effect of institutions on innovation is causal

Introduction, 97. — I. The propensity to develop pure science, 98. — II. The propensity to invent, 102. — III. The propensity to innovate, 105. — IV. The propensity to finance innovation, 108. — V. The propensity to accept innovations, 110