Innovation Policy and Corporate R&D

Innovation and Corporate Conservatism∗

In this paper, we study firms’ incentives to promote innovation. We analyze a situation in which an employee in a firm can invest in discovering new ideas. An innovative employee has to decide whether to disclose his idea within the firm, to maintain the status-quo by not implementing it, or to form a spin-out firm. In a framework in which intellectual property rights are not perfect, a contrac...

Corporate environmentalism and environmental innovation.

Several papers have explored the effect of tighter environmental standards on environmental innovation. While mandatory regulation remains the central tenet of US environmental policy, the regulatory landscape has changed since the early 1990s with the increased recourse by federal and state agencies to corporate environmentalism--voluntary pollution prevention (P2) by firms--to achieve environ...

Inventor CEOs and Corporate Innovation

One in four U.S. high-tech firms are led by CEOs with hands-on innovation experience as inventors. We show that these “Inventor CEOs” stimulate higher quality firm-level innovation, especially when they have a personal history of high-impact patents. A CEO’s technology-class specific inventor experience also predicts the technology classes in which a firm has its greatest innovation success. Ut...

Shareholder Litigation and Corporate Innovation

We examine whether and to what extent shareholder litigation shapes corporate innovation. We use the staggered adoption of the universal demand (UD) laws in 23 states from 1989 to 2005. These laws impose obstacles against shareholders filing derivative lawsuits thereby significantly reducing a firm’s litigation risk. Following the passage of the UD laws, firms have invested more in R&D, produce...

Innovation surveys and innovation policy