We provide evidence that risk aversion leads pharmaceutical firms to underinvest in radical innovation. We introduce a new measure of drug novelty based on chemical similarity and show that firms face a risk-reward trade-off: novel drug candidates are less likely to obtain FDA approval but are based on more valuable patents. Consistent with a simple model of costly external finance, we show that a positive shock to firms’ net worth leads firms to develop more novel drugs. This suggests that even large firms may behave as though they are risk averse, reducing their willingness to investment in potentially valuable radical innovation.

High‐powered incentives may induce higher managerial effort, but they also expose managers to idiosyncratic risk. If managers are risk averse, they might underinvest when firm‐specific uncertainty increases, leading to suboptimal investment decisions from the perspective of well‐diversified shareholders. We empirically document that, when idiosyncratic risk rises, firm investment falls, and more so when managers own a larger fraction of the firm. This negative effect of managerial risk aversion on investment is mitigated if executives are compensated with options rather than with shares or if institutional investors form a large part of the shareholder base.

Intangible capital which relies on essential human inputs, or 'organization capital,' presents a unique challenge for measurement. Organization capital cannot be fully owned by firms' financiers, because it is partly embodied in key labor inputs. Instead, cash flows must be shared with key talent and thus neither book nor market values will fully capture its value. Measurement of organization capital requires a model featuring these unique property rights. We use accounting data along with a simple example of such a model to measure the fraction of the US capital stock which is missing from book and market values.

Organization capital is a production factor that is embodied in the firm's key talent and has an efficiency that is firm specific. Hence, both shareholders and key talent have a claim to its cash flows. We develop a model in which the outside option of the key talent determines the share of firm cash flows that accrue to shareholders. This outside option varies systematically and renders firms with high organization capital riskier from shareholders' perspective. We find that firms with more organization capital have average returns that are 4.6% higher than firms with less organization capital.

We propose a new measure of the economic importance of each innovation. Our measure uses newly collected data on patents issued to U.S. firms in the 1926 to 2010 period, combined with the stock market response to news about patents. Our patent-level estimates of private economic value are positively related to the scientific value of these patents, as measured by the number of citations the patent receives in the future. Our new measure is associated with substantial growth, reallocation, and creative destruction, consistent with the predictions of Schumpeterian growth models. Aggregating our measure suggests that technological innovation accounts for significant medium-run fluctuations in aggregate economic growth and TFP. Our measure contains additional information relative to citation-weighted patent counts; the relation between our measure and firm growth is considerably stronger. Importantly, the degree of creative destruction that is associated with our measure is higher than previous estimates, confirming that it is a useful proxy for the private valuation of patents.

We develop a general equilibrium model of asset prices in which benefits of technological innovation are distributed asymmetrically. Financial market participants do not capture all economic gains from innovation even when they own shares in innovating firms. Such gains accrue partly to the innovators, who cannot sell claims on proceeds from their future ideas. We show how the resulting inequality among agents can give rise to a high risk premium on the aggregate stock market, return comovement and average return differences among firms, and the failure of traditional representative agent asset pricing models to account for cross-sectional differences in risk premia.