Innovation and Institutional Ownership Revisited: An Empirical Investigation with Count Data Models

By discriminating between a lazy manager and a career concerns hypothesis, Aghion et al. (The American Economic Review 2013, 103(1), 277-304) try to disentangle the link between innovation and institutional ownership. Citation-weighted patent counts are used as a proxy for innovation, which motivates the use of count data models. While a replication in a narrow sense confirms their empirical results which are mainly based on Poisson models, an analysis that extends the model framework by count data hurdle models does not yield the same findings. However, a remarkably stable positive correlation of citation-weighted patents and institutional ownership across all model specifications can be shown.