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.

We examine how financial market development affects technological innovation. Using a large data set that includes 32 developed and emerging countries and a fixed effects identification strategy, we identify economic mechanisms through which the development of equity markets and credit markets affects technological innovation. We show that industries that are more dependent on external finance and that are more high-tech intensive exhibit a disproportionally higher innovation level in countries with better developed equity markets. However, the development of credit markets appears to discourage innovation in industries with these characteristics. Our paper provides new insights into the real effects of financial market development on the economy.

We reexamine the positive association between stock option vega and earnings management previously documented by Armstrong, Larcker, Ormazabal, and Taylor (2013; henceforth, ALOT). In contrast to ALOT, prior empirical research and practitioner literature emphasizes earnings management's goals of increasing stock price and reducing volatility. Specifically, we assess whether the association is robust to (i) employing discretionary accruals that are less prone to misspecification, (ii) focusing on a more recent time period, and (iii) including additional controls for period‐specific factors. Our main findings are as follows. First, we fail to find a positive association between vega and earnings management after controlling for performance‐related misspecification in discretionary accruals. Second, we find no association between vega and earnings management in a more recent time period, suggesting the results of ALOT may be sensitive to period‐specific factors. Last, the positive association vanishes when we control for year fixed effects, growth opportunities, or monitoring, suggesting the original results of ALOT's research may be sensitive to correlated, omitted variables. Overall, our results question the extent to which vega incentivizes earnings management. Our results may be of interest to boards of directors in designing executive compensation contracts, to regulators in crafting policies that maintain high levels of financial reporting quality, and to researchers seeking to identify settings where earnings management incentives are most salient.

We find strong evidence that when a firm's customer base is more concentrated, the firm's CEO receives more risk-taking incentives in her compensation package. This finding is robust to numerous alternative measures, alternative specifications, alternative subsamples, and different attempts that mitigate endogeneity concerns. Further, the positive effect of customer concentration on CEO risk-taking incentive provision is more prominent when the CEO is more reluctant to take risks, when the firm has more investment opportunities, and when the firm is more prone to the costs of losing large customers. These findings are consistent with the notion that boards provide additional risk-taking incentives to offset the CEO's aversion to the risk of non-diversified revenue streams, thereby preventing excessive managerial conservatism at the expense of value maximization.

Motivated by a theoretical model, we examine for 43 countries whether it is policy or policy uncertainty that affects technological innovation more. Innovation activities, measured by patent-based proxies, are not, on average, affected by which policy is in place. Innovation activities, however, drop significantly during times of policy uncertainty measured by national elections. The drop is greater for more influential innovations (citations in the right tail, exploratory rather than exploitative innovations) and for innovation-intensive industries. We use close presidential elections and ethnic fractionalization to address endogeneity concerns. We uncover the mechanism underlying the main result by showing that the number of patenting inventors decreases with policy uncertainty. Political compromise, we conclude, encourages innovation.

Firms with more competitive threats from the product market are less likely to commit violations and pay lower penalties. These findings are robust to alternative measures, specifications, and subsamples, as well as different attempts that mitigate endogeneity concerns. Further analyses reveal that the disciplining effect of competition is more pronounced when managers have greater incentives to shirk and when internal governance is weaker, and that violations are associated with poor product market performance only in the presence of competitive pressure. Firms under competitive pressure are more likely to adopt ESG-related incentives in executive compensation contracts and exhibit better worker safety practices. Overall, our evidence suggests that product market threats reduce managerial slack in combating misconduct by increasing the expected damage of violations.