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.

We examine broad effects of MiFID II, which mandated unbundled pricing of analyst research in the European Union beginning in 2018. We find significant reductions in sell-side analyst following, particularly for firms for which the marginal analyst was less important (larger, older, less volatile firms with greater coverage and more accurate forecasts). High quality analysts (more accurate, experienced, and in positions of seniority) were more likely to leave the sell-side and move to the buy-side, while remaining sell-side analysts increased efforts to make their forecasts more informative (more accurate, more detailed, and more likely to include informative recommendations resulting in larger stock price responses). Firms responded to a loss of sell-side coverage with more frequent, forward-looking, and informative investor relations events, especially for firms that lost the most coverage. Our results support recent theoretical analysis predicting that unbundling had significant implications for sell-side research, buy-side research, and firm responses.

The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation. We use the plausibly exogenous assignment to patent applications of examiners who differ in their enforcement of disclosure requirements as a source of variation in disclosure quality. We find that some examiners are significantly more lenient with respect to patent disclosure quality requirements, and that patents granted by these examiners include significantly lower-quality disclosures and generate significantly less follow-on innovation. Overall, our evidence suggests that high-quality patent disclosures create knowledge spillovers that spur follow-on innovation.