Empirical Essays on Finance and Innovation

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies in finance and innovation. I study various financial factors affecting innovation such as stock market manipulation and public to private transaction. I also investigate the effect of ownership structure on these public to private transactions.

The first study finds that the End-of-day price manipulation is associated with short-termism of the firms orientation, long-term harm to a firms equity values, and commensurate with reduced incentives for employees to innovate. Insider trading, by contrast, enables innovators to achieve exacerbated profits from innovation. Using a sample of suspected manipulation events for all stocks from nine countries over the years 2003-2010, I find evidence consistent with these real impacts of market manipulation on innovation. These findings are not attributable to bad firms innovating less and manipulating more, since the average firm subjected to manipulation in the sample is more innovative during the pre-manipulation period.

The second study investigates the effect of going private buyout transactions on the investments in innovation using an international sample of buyout transactions from 36 countries over 1997 to 2011. Patent counts and citations are used to proxy for quantity, quality and economic importance of innovation. The data indicate that the effect of buyouts on innovation is quite sizable in terms of quantity and quality, as both patent counts and citations drop following a buyout. I also find that the number of radical patents (i.e. more scientific) drop as well. When we split the sample into institutional and management buyouts the negative association is only confirmed for institutional buyouts. We find that the negative effect of buyouts on innovation is aggravated in post-2006 period, suggesting that the nature of deals has worsened for innovation over time. The data also show that buyouts have a negative effect on innovation efficiency.

The third study considers ownership structure of target firms that are subject to going private buyout transactions, which are often highly leveraged and give rise to potential agency conflicts among existing shareholders. In this study, I examine ownership structure prior to going private transactions in 33 countries around the world from 2002 to 2014.The data indicate strong and consistent evidence that pre-going private ownership is characterized by higher institutional and corporate ownership. Family ownership lowers the probability of a public to private transaction. Stronger creditor rights increase the probability of going private particularly for whole company and institutional buyouts.