A hstract-This paper develops a model of the decision to adopt interrelated innovations emphasizing the role of innovative ability and a measure of the economic incentive to be informed about innovations. Education, experience, and the availability of information are hypothesized to be measurable dimensions of innovative ability. The results from fitting univariate, conditional, and joint logistic models suggest that innovative ability contributes significantly to explaining the adoption of new technology but does not explain its diffusion. The results also indicate that the diffusion of previously available innovations depends on the introduction and adoption of interrelated current innovations

Despite a longstanding debate over the pros and cons of imposing legal liability on directors and officers (D&Os), there is limited evidence on how D&O liability affects corporate innovation. We study this question by exploiting Nevada's 2001 corporate law change that dramatically lowered D&O legal liability and helped Nevada become the second most popular state for out-of-state incorporations. We find that firms incorporated in Nevada exhibit an increase in innovation outputs relative to matched control firms after the law change, particularly firms facing higher litigation risk or operating in more innovative industries. The results are driven mainly by exchange-listed firms that are subject to better governance than over-the-counter (OTC) listed firms. Lower D&O liability also enables firms to pursue more risky, but potentially more rewarding, explorative innovation. Therefore, although holding D&Os liable may be desirable overall, it also entails a cost by discouraging innovation in some firms. Our study has implications for how the litigation environment may influence sustainable growth via innovation

We examine how fintech development affects corporate innovation. Using the city-level fintech index that includes 331 cities, which is constructed based on data from Ant Finance Service Group, we identify the economic mechanisms through which fintech development affects technological innovation. We show that firms that are more financially constrained exhibit a disproportionally higher innovation level in cities with better developed fintech services. We further find that fintech development promotes lending to firms and stimulates R&D investment because internet credit intensifies bank loan competition. Our paper provides new insights into the effects of fintech development on the real economy

This article uses British firm-level panel data on actual innovative activity drawn from different statistical sources to identify the effect of technical change on jobs. Previous work tends to find positive associations of proxies for technical change and employment, but such studies suffer from various statistical drawbacks. In this study, even when one controls for fixed effects, dynamics, and endogeneity, innovations have a positive and significant effect on employment, which persists over several years. There seems to be little direct role for spillover effects from industry innovations, or any role for industry wages or union power

I. Introduction, 221.—II. The sample of innovations, 222.—III. Estimation of social benefits: product innovations used by firms, 222.—IV. Parallel innovative efforts, time horizon, and rates of return, 226.—V. Product innovations used by households, 229.—VI. Process innovations, 231.—VII. Social and private rates of return, 233.—VIII. Factors associated with the gap between social and private rates of return, 235.—IX. Unemployment, repercussions on other markets, and future changes in technology, 238.—X. Conclusion, 239

The hypothesis that the relative innovative advantage between large and small firms is determined by market concentration, the extent of entry barriers, the composition of firm size within the industry, and the overall importance of innovation activity is tested. The authors find that large firms tend to have the relative innovative advantage in industries that are capital intensive, concentrated, highly unionized, and produce a differentiated good. The small firms tend to have the relative advantage in industries that are highly innovative, utilize a large component of skilled labor, and tend to be composed of a relatively high proportion of large firms

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

This paper uses a database of 58 financial innovations from 1974–1986 to examine how investment banks are compensated for their investments in developing new products. Investment banks that create new products do not charge higher prices in the brief period of ‘monopoly’ before imitative products appear, and in the long-run charge prices below, not above, those charged by rivals offering imitative products. However, banks capture a larger share of underwritings with innovations than with imitative products. One interpretation of the price and quantity evidence is that innovators become inframarginal rivals that enjoy lower costs of trading, underwriting, and marketing

Following state-level legal changes that increase labor dismissal costs, firms increase their innovation in new processes that facilitate the adoption of cost-saving production methods, especially in industries with a large share of labor costs in total costs. Firms with high innovation ability exhibit larger increases in process innovation and capital-labor ratios, an effect driven by both increases in capital investment and decreases in employment. By facilitating the adjustment of the input mix when conditions in input markets change, innovation ability allows firms to mitigate value losses and is a key driver of their performance

We develop a dynamic model of the adoption of financial innovations. Each period, firms decide whether or not to adopt an innovation of uncertain value, and the profitability of each period’s adoptions reveals information about the innovation’s value. We show that characteristics of financial innovation waves cited by critics as evidence of irrational excess are, in fact, consistent with fully rational behavior. We also show that social welfare is enhanced when more firms adopt innovations of questionable value and that financial intermediaries have an incentive to encourage such adoption