In our model multiple innovators compete against each other by submitting investment proposals to an investor. The investor chooses the least expensive proposal and the timing of the investment. Innovators privately learn the cost of investing. The investor has to compensate the innovators for their reservation wages, but competition makes screening easier and helps to erode innovators’ informational rents. Consequently, competition leads to faster innovation, because the investor has less need to delay expensive investments. With an endogenous number of innovators investment timing becomes first best

Placing innovative assets in a separate subsidiary creates more autonomy for the unit manager of the innovation than a division, even when the subsidiary is wholly owned and controlled by the parent. The key driver is limited liability: unlike a division, the parent has the option to walk away from the subsidiary’s debt obligations. As a result, the parent invests less in developing internal uses for the innovation. This causes the unit manager to invest more in developing independent uses for the innovation: he must ”sink or swim” on his own effort, and his desired actions are less subject to overrule. Received June 29, 2012; editorial decision June 8, 2016 by Editor Paolo Fulghieri

We review the accounting literature on innovation, focusing on the economic attributes of innovation that collectively differentiate innovation from other assets: novelty, nonrivalry, and partial excludability. These attributes help innovation drive economic growth but create unique information-based challenges that accounting information and researchers are well suited to address. We discuss the definition and measurement of innovation and highlight common mistakes researchers make when measuring innovation and when using sources of plausibly exogenous variation. We then review the accounting literatures on the disclosure, management, financial reporting, taxation, and contracting and financing of innovation. For each of these literatures we identify challenges and opportunities for future research

I examine the relation between the presence of governance provisions and corporate innovation for a sample of firms between 1984 and 1997. I find a positive relation between four proxies for innovation and the broad Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick (2003) Index. However, in subsample analyses, I find that only those provisions that officers and directors actively adopt are positively related to innovation; coverage by state-level antitakeover legislation is typically unassociated or negatively associated with innovation. The evidence suggests that it is the visibility of officers and directors' actions rather than the potency of the takeover protection that best explains the observed pattern

This study presents a novel empirical approach to identify financing constraints for innovation based on the concept of an ideal test (Hall, 2008). Firms were offered a hypothetical payment and asked to choose between alternatives of use. If they selected additional innovation projects, they must have had some unexploited investment opportunities that were not profitable using more costly external finance. We attribute constraints for innovation not only to lacking financing, but also to firms' innovative capability. Econometric results show that financial constraints do not depend on the availability of internal funds per se but that they are driven by innovative capability

We examine whether political corruption impedes innovation. Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. firms, we find that corruption has a substantial, negative relation with the quantity and quality of innovation. These results are robust to using various fixed effects, proxies for corruption and innovation, and subsamples. To establish causality, we employ 2 instruments for corruption: local ethnic diversity and the corruption of the state a firm’s founder grew up in. Corruption appears to reduce innovation output both on average and for the most innovative firms. Overall, this evidence is consistent with the notion that corruption reduces social welfare by impeding innovation

Acquiring innovation through M&A is subject to information frictions, as assessing the value of innovative targets is a challenging task. We find an inverted U-shaped relation between firm innovation and takeover exposure; equity usage increases with target innovation; and the deal completion rate drops with innovation. We develop and estimate a model of acquiring innovation under information frictions, featuring endogenous merger, innovation, and offer composition decisions. Our estimates suggest that acquirers’ due diligence reveals only 30% of private information possessed by targets. Eliminating information frictions increases capitalized merger gains by 59%, stimulates innovation, and boosts productivity, business dynamism, and social welfare

Stocks with increases in idiosyncratic risk tend to earn low subsequent returns for a few months. However, high idiosyncratic risk stocks eventually earn persistently high returns. These results are consistent with positively priced idiosyncratic risk and temporary underreaction to idiosyncratic risk innovations. Because risk levels and innovations are correlated, the relation between historical idiosyncratic risk and returns may reflect both risk premiums and underreaction and yield misleading inference regarding the price of risk. The results reconcile previous work offering conflicting evidence on the price of idiosyncratic risk and help to discriminate among explanations for the idiosyncratic risk-return relation

We exploit the deregulation of interstate bank branching laws to test whether banking competition affects innovation. We find robust evidence that banking competition reduces state-level innovation by public corporations headquartered within deregulating states. Innovation increases among private firms that are dependent on external finance and that have limited access to credit from local banks. We argue that banking competition enables small, innovative firms to secure financing instead of being acquired by public corporations. Therefore, banking competition reduces the supply of innovative targets, which reduces the portion of state-level innovation attributable to public corporations. Overall, these results shed light on the real effects of banking competition and the determinants of innovation

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