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ESSAYS ON CORPORATE INNOVATION
Qin, Yueru
Qin, Yueru
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Thesis/Dissertation
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2024-05
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Business Administration/Finance
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10169
Abstract
This dissertation examines various aspects of corporate innovation. Specifically, it investigates how innovation information disclosure affects firms’ decisions on mergers and acquisitions and cost stickiness, as well as how gender disparity affects innovation outcomes by female inventors.The first chapter (with Connie X. Mao, Xuan Tian, Chi Zhang) studies the effects of information frictions on acquisition activities by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in information gathering costs brought by the expansion of the USPTO Patent and Trademark Depository Library system. The findings reveal that firms become more active in technological acquisitions following local patent library openings. In addition, acquirers prefer targets that are geographically or technologically close to a less extent, technology M&A completion rates increase and performance improves, and post-merger innovation output enhances through more collaboration between acquirers’ and targets’ inventors. Overall, this study sheds new light on the importance of information gathering costs in corporate takeovers and the search for human capital synergies.
The second chapter (with Yuqi Gu, Connie X. Mao) explores the existence and causes of gender disparities in the patent examination process. It finds that applications filed by female inventors are significantly less likely to receive a first-action approval or a final granting than those filed by male inventors. Consistent with the ‘gender bias’ hypothesis, the female disadvantage in patenting becomes smaller when inventors’ gender is less likely known to examiners. Moreover, the economic value of patents granted to female inventors is significantly higher, suggesting that women must clear a higher hurdle to secure a patent compared to men. Additionally, this study documents that women are significantly more likely than men to abandon their applications after receiving a rejection in the first-action decision, lending support to our ‘lack of persistence’ hypothesis. The findings shed light on the causes of gender differences in patent examination and offer implications for policies aimed at creating a level playing field in patenting.
Finally, the third chapter (with Yuqi Gu, Bo Ouyang) examines the effect of information disclosure regulation on corporate resource adjustment, by using the empirical setting of the passage of the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that impacted the information environment. This study finds that the cost stickiness of both R&D and SG&A is significantly reduced after AIPA. The cross-sectional tests suggest the anti-cost stickiness effect is more pronounced in firms that have weaker corporate governance and severer information asymmetry, are able to benefit more from a ricker information set, and are more sensitive to adjustment cost changes. Further tests also suggest that the reduced cost stickiness has positive implications for firm value. Collectively, the results inform regulators of the potential benefit of information disclosure regulation with respect to corporate resource adjustments and provide evidence on the role of the information environment in corporate resource adjustments.
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