In our forthcoming American Economic Review paper, Innovation and Institutional Ownership, we examine the incentives to innovate at the firm level by studying the relationship between innovation and institutional ownership. Innovation is the main engine of growth. But what determines a firm’s ability to innovate? Innovating requires taking risk and forgoing current returns in the hope of future ones. Furthermore, while any type of financing is plagued by moral hazard and adverse selection, the financing of innovation is probably the most vulnerable to these problems (Arrow, 1962) since the information that needs to be conveyed is hard to communicate to outsiders. This paper is an attempt at analyzing the corporate governance of innovation and more specifically the role of institutional owners in fostering (or hindering) innovation.

While the ability to diversify risk across a large mass of investors makes publicly traded companies the ideal locus for innovation, managerial agency problems might undermine the innovation effort of these companies. In publicly traded companies, the pressure for quarterly results may induce a short-term focus (Porter, 1992). And the increased risk of managerial turnover (Kaplan and Minton, 2008) might dissuade risk-averse senior managers from this activity. Finally, innovation requires effort and “lazy” managers might not exert enough of it. Hence, it is especially important to study the governance of innovation in publicly traded companies, which account for a large share of the private investments in research and development (R&D).

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