Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. We find that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar invested in research and development (R&D), after accounting for other confounding factors. These results are confirmed when we use a propensity score matching procedure and an instrumental variable approach to control for the potential endogeneity of options trading. The evidence is consistent with the notion that the enhanced informational efficiency induced by options leads to an improved allocation of corporate resources. We further discuss possible underlying economic mechanisms through which more active options markets boost innovation and show that the effect remains substantial even after controlling for these mechanisms. Considering the average increase in the dollar volume of options traded for our sample firms, we conclude that a 200% move in options volume increases firm innovation by about 31%.

This study examines how the ownership structure of corporations shapes their responses to discontinuous technological change. We analyze whether mixed ownership, a situation where following privatization a company's shares are held both privately and by the government, is associated with less innovation in response to discontinuous technological change. We argue that mixed ownership is associated with governance conflicts that affect a company's ability to respond to the challenges posed by discontinuous technological change. Our empirical analysis uses data on European telecommunications operators for the period 2000–2016 when they faced sweeping technological change due to the advent of Internet-based communication services. Our baseline result suggests that operators with mixed ownership file around 70% fewer patents in relevant digital technologies than companies that are fully private or where the government owns a majority of shares. We find that mixed ownership also affects negatively the acquisition of externally developed technology.

We examine how the prospect of research and development (R&D) disclosure affects a firm’s institutional investor base. Difference-in-differences (DiD) regressions around the enactment of the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA), which mandated the public disclosure of patent applications within 18 months of filing, show that short-term institutional investors increase their holdings before public information is released, whereas long-term investors do not adjust their positions. This anticipatory shift is consistent with theoretical predictions that expected disclosure strengthens short-horizon investors’ incentives to acquire and trade on private information. We further document that stock prices reflect more firm-specific information leading up to disclosure and that improved liquidity at disclosure enables short-term investors to partially unwind their positions. Our paper offers novel evidence on how increases in the expected likelihood of disclosure shape investor behavior and the composition of firms’ investor bases.