Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments August 21, 2022 erstellt
Description:
This paper investigates the impacts of CEOs’ research experiences on corporate innovation, and shows that the firms managed by researcher CEOs have significantly higher investments in innovative activities, generate better innovation output as measured by the number of patents and citations, and produce more diverse, original and general patents. Researcher CEOs accomplish this improvement through increasing firms’ innovative efficiency. Further evidence suggests that our results are mainly driven by the work experiences in research institutions, which are most research-intensive. We then employ CEOs’ exogenous turnovers as shocks to establish the causality and demonstrate that the impacts of CEOs’ research experiences on corporate innovation are causal. We also show that CEOs’ research experiences can mitigate agency problems, thereby enhancing firms’ innovative activities. Further cross-sectional analyses indicate that the effect of researcher CEOs on innovation is more pronounced in firms with higher institutional holdings, better innovation resources and environment, and in state-owned companies, while the effect is impeded in firms seeking higher accounting conservatism. We further document that CEOs’ research experiences can substitute the role of hiring more R&D employees in improving firms’ innovation outcomes. Overall, our findings suggest that researcher CEOs are better innovators and help promote corporate innovation