Innovation
Working Paper
Bringing the AGM to the 21st Century: Blockchain and Smart Contracting Tech for Shareholder Involvement
The AGM is often considered to play an important role in direct shareholder monitoring of directors and corporate blockholders. However, its practical functioning suffers from large obstacles.
In this research we outline the AGM’s flaws...Read more
The Promise and Perils of Crowdfunding: Between Corporate Finance and Consumer Contracts
‘Crowdfunding’ — raising capital through large numbers of small contributions — is a burgeoning phenomenon, spurred by the internet’s capacity to reduce communication costs. Its still-evolving status is reflected in diversity of contracting...Read more
Fintech and the Financing of Entrepreneurs: From Crowdfunding to Marketplace Lending
For the last decade economists have been preoccupied with the decline in bank financing to small businesses and entrepreneurs. This effort has produced a better understanding of the obstacles to external financing. We examine the market and ...Read more
New Models of ‘Intelligent Investing’ for the Post-Crisis Economy
Is coronavirus accelerating the future? Will the crisis provide a tipping point that encourages corporations to promote socially desirable values? Will there be a wider recognition that a sole focus on profits and investors hurts both companies...Read more
Creative Corporate Culture and Innovation
We define creative companies by means of the Competing Value Framework, and we identify them by means of textual analysis. We show that a creative corporate culture is an important driver of innovation, as measured by the number of patents a firm...Read more
Technology and Corporate Governance: Blockchain, Crypto, and Artificial Intelligence
Over recent decades, the on-going “digital revolution” has transformed many aspects of everyday life. Think of the increased power and shrinking size of personal computers and smartphones; the global expansion of the Internet and the new forms of...Read more
Trust, Incomplete Contracting, and Corporate Innovation
Innovation is a contract intensive economic activity in a world of incomplete contracts. We show that trust mitigates incomplete contracting and enhances innovation by acting as an informal contracting mechanism. Trust plays an especially...Read more
Tech, Regulatory Arbitrage, and Limits
Regulatory arbitrage refers to structuring activity to take advantage of gaps or differences in regulations or laws. Examples include Facebook modifying its terms and conditions to reduce the exposure of its user data to strict European privacy...Read more
Litigating Innovation: Evidence from Securities Class Action Lawsuits
Low-quality securities class action lawsuits disproportionally target firms with valuable innovation output and lead to substantial shareholder-value losses. We establish this fact using data on class action lawsuits between 1996 and 2011 and the...Read more
ICO Investors
We conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4,700 contributors. The median participant contributes small amounts and many investors sell their tokens before the underlying product...Read more
Teams and Bankruptcy
We study how the human capital embedded in teams is reallocated in corporate bankruptcies using data on US inventors. We find that bankruptcies reduce team stability. After a bankruptcy, team-dependent inventors produce fewer and less impactful...Read more