We examine how U.S. publicly listed firms' brand innovation is sacrificed when managers reduce marketing budgets in order to make short-term earnings targets. Using the newly available U.S. trademark dataset to measure the lifespan of new brands, we find that new brands' survival rate...

Prior studies suggest that liquid option markets enhance the ability of managers to hedge their wealth portfolio against downside risk. In this study, we examine the impact of managerial hedging opportunities on brand capital investment. We find that more hedging opportunities induced by active...

Using a new trademark-based product market competition measure and a novel trademark-merger dataset over the period 1983-2016, we show that companies facing greater product market competition are more likely to be acquirers. We further show that postmerger, compared to their non-acquiring peers,...

After constructing high-frequency measures of informed trading as well as the measure of brand innovation proxied by the number of trademark registrations (TMRs), we first examine how market participants respond to the news about TMRs. The results show that the information on TMRs predicts...

Routinely granted injunctions during patent lawsuits have been regarded as a significant obstacle to economic growth and corporate competition. We use the 2006 Supreme Court ruling in eBay v. MercExchange that reduced injunction likelihood in cases related to information and communications...

Routinely granted injunctions during patent lawsuits have been regarded as a significant obstacle to economic growth and corporate competition. We use the 2006 Supreme Court ruling in eBay v. MercExchange that reduced injunction likelihood in cases related to information and communications...

In this paper, we examine whether and how firms’ brand capital is hurt by cybersecurity breaches. Our difference-in-differences analysis based on matched pairs indicates that firms suffering cybersecurity breaches are associated with more canceled trademarks, fewer trademark registrations, and...

While product and company reputation are among the most valued intangible assets, we have little understanding of when and why managers focus on such resources. This shortcoming has limited both the resource-based and attention-based views of the firm. We construct a novel and comprehensive...