Corporate transparency reduces information asymmetries between firms and capital markets but increases the costs associated with information leakage to competitors. We explore how a country’s ...information environment affects innovation, an activity characterized by high information asymmetries and potentially severe proprietary costs. Studying both long-run cross-country differences in the availability of firm-specific information to corporate outsiders, as well as quasi-experimental shocks to the information environment following transparency-enhancing security market reforms, we document significantly higher rates of R&D and patenting in richer information environments. The effects of transparency are strongest in industries that rely on external equity rather than bank debt, indicating that transparency facilitates innovation by reducing the information costs associated with arm’s-length financing. In contrast, transparency has no impact on physical capital accumulation, consistent with fewer information asymmetries in tangible assets. An economy’s information environment has important but heterogeneous effects on the nature and extent of real economic activity.
This paper was accepted by Shiva Rajgopal, accounting.
Ribosomal RNA genes have become the standard molecular markers for microbial community analysis for good reasons, including universal occurrence in cellular organisms, availability of large ...databases, and ease of rRNA gene region amplification and analysis. As markers, however, rRNA genes have some significant limitations. The rRNA genes are often present in multiple copies, unlike most protein-coding genes. The slow rate of change in rRNA genes means that multiple species sometimes share identical 16S rRNA gene sequences, while many more species share identical sequences in the short 16S rRNA regions commonly analyzed. In addition, the genes involved in many important processes are not distributed in a phylogenetically coherent manner, potentially due to gene loss or horizontal gene transfer. While rRNA genes remain the most commonly used markers, key genes in ecologically important pathways, e.g., those involved in carbon and nitrogen cycling, can provide important insights into community composition and function not obtainable through rRNA analysis. However, working with ecofunctional gene data requires some tools beyond those required for rRNA analysis. To address this, our Functional Gene Pipeline and Repository (FunGene; http://fungene.cme.msu.edu/) offers databases of many common ecofunctional genes and proteins, as well as integrated tools that allow researchers to browse these collections and choose subsets for further analysis, build phylogenetic trees, test primers and probes for coverage, and download aligned sequences. Additional FunGene tools are specialized to process coding gene amplicon data. For example, FrameBot produces frameshift-corrected protein and DNA sequences from raw reads while finding the most closely related protein reference sequence. These tools can help provide better insight into microbial communities by directly studying key genes involved in important ecological processes.
Ribosomal Database Project (RDP; http://rdp.cme.msu.edu/) provides the research community with aligned and annotated rRNA gene sequence data, along with tools to allow researchers to analyze their ...own rRNA gene sequences in the RDP framework. RDP data and tools are utilized in fields as diverse as human health, microbial ecology, environmental microbiology, nucleic acid chemistry, taxonomy and phylogenetics. In addition to aligned and annotated collections of bacterial and archaeal small subunit rRNA genes, RDP now includes a collection of fungal large subunit rRNA genes. RDP tools, including Classifier and Aligner, have been updated to work with this new fungal collection. The use of high-throughput sequencing to characterize environmental microbial populations has exploded in the past several years, and as sequence technologies have improved, the sizes of environmental datasets have increased. With release 11, RDP is providing an expanded set of tools to facilitate analysis of high-throughput data, including both single-stranded and paired-end reads. In addition, most tools are now available as open source packages for download and local use by researchers with high-volume needs or who would like to develop custom analysis pipelines.
This paper investigates the competitive structure of restaurant retailing by developing and testing a conceptual framework that combines household production economics theory with research on hedonic ...and utilitarian retail patronage. The results generally support this conceptualization. This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, the theory of household economics provides the missing theoretical rationale for studying the demographic correlates of hedonic versus utilitarian retail patronage motives. Second, this study also provides evidence that the utilitarian motives underlying research on household economics can be meaningfully supplemented by investigating hedonic patronage motives. Finally, this research adds to the literature on restaurant patronage rooted in household economics by studying empirically the role of retail marketing mix variables in restaurant retailing.
Abstract
Higher country taxes on noxious manufacturing emissions lead to substantial increases in firms’ R&D spending. The R&D response is entirely driven by those high-pollution firms most affected ...by emissions taxes. Pollution taxes increase the marginal value of R&D spending in polluting firms, even when this spending does not lead to new innovation. Pollution taxes have the strongest effect on R&D investment in sectors in which new invention is difficult to appropriate and outside knowledge is easier to acquire, suggesting an important reason dirty firms invest in R&D is to expand their capacity to absorb external knowledge and technical know-how.
Weathering Cash Flow Shocks BROWN, JAMES R.; GUSTAFSON, MATTHEW T.; IVANOV, IVAN T.
The Journal of finance (New York),
08/2021, Letnik:
76, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
ABSTRACT
Unexpectedly severe winter weather, which is arguably exogenous to firm and bank fundamentals, represents a significant cash flow shock for bank‐borrowing firms. Firms respond to these ...shocks by drawing on and increasing the size of their credit lines. Banks charge borrowers for this liquidity via increased interest rates and less borrower‐friendly loan provisions. Credit line adjustments occur within one calendar quarter of the shock and persist for at least nine months. Overall, we provide evidence that bank credit lines are an important tool for managing the nonfundamental component of cash flow volatility, especially for solvent, small bank borrowers.
The financing of R&D provides a potentially important channel to link finance and economic growth, but there is no direct evidence that financial effects are large enough to impact aggregate R&D. ...U.S. firms finance R&D from volatile sources: cash flow and stock issues. We estimate dynamic R&D models for high-tech firms and find significant effects of cash flow and external equity for young, but not mature, firms. The financial coefficients for young firms are large enough that finance supply shifts can explain most of the dramatic 1990s R&D boom, which implies a significant connection between finance, innovation, and growth.
Law, Stock Markets, and Innovation BROWN, JAMES R.; MARTINSSON, GUSTAV; PETERSEN, BRUCE C.
The Journal of finance (New York),
August 2013, Letnik:
68, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We study a broad sample of firms across 32 countries and find that strong shareholder protections and better access to stock market financing lead to substantially higher long-run rates of R&D ...investment, particularly in small firms, but are unimportant for fixed capital investment. Credit market development has a modest impact on fixed investment but no impact on R&D. These findings connect law and stock markets with innovative activities key to economic growth, and show that legal rules and financial developments affecting the availability of external equity financing are particularly important for risky, intangible investments not easily financed with debt.
•Economies are prone to underinvest in R&D, particularly in high-tech industries.•Policies that encourage arm’s-length financing promote high-tech R&D.•Stronger intellectual property protections are ...positively related to high-tech R&D.•Stronger creditor rights share a negative relation with R&D in innovative industries.•R&D tax credits are associated with more low-tech (but not high-tech) R&D.
R&D drives innovation and productivity growth, but appropriability problems and financing difficulties likely keep R&D investment well below the socially optimal level, particularly in high- technology industries. Though countries around the world are increasingly interested in using tax incentives and other policy initiatives to address this underinvestment problem, there is little empirical evidence comparing the effectiveness of alternative domestic policies and institutions at spurring R&D. Using data from a broad sample of OECD economies, we find that financial market rules that improve accounting standards and strengthen contract enforcement share a significant positive relation with R&D in more innovative industries, as do stronger legal protections for intellectual property. In contrast, stronger creditor rights and more generous R&D tax credits have a negative differential relation with R&D in more innovative industries. These results suggest that domestic policies directly dealing with appropriability and financing problems may be more effective than traditional tax subsides at promoting the innovative investments that drive economic growth.
PDF
