Existing studies of exit delay typically focus on rational, behavioral, or organizational explanations in isolation. We integrate these different theoretical explanations, developing testable hypotheses for each, and examine them using the population of US banks between 1984 and 1997. Banks'...

Despite evidence that delayed exit is a pervasive and consequential problem, relatively little is known about its causes. Moreover, the study of exit delay is confounded by the fact that behavioral theories arising in the literature on escalation of commitment and economic theories that...

This paper examines whether declining research productivity can be explained by fishing out—is the production of new knowledge decreasing in the level of existing knowledge? We estimate the knowledge production function for U.S. firms and find instead that knowledge production is increasing in...

One of the foundational assumptions of patent law is that imbuing inventions with intellectual property rights (IPR) is necessary to bring forth innovation. We test this foundational assumption by examining the impact of IPR on commercialization of university research. Using the full set of US...

A major trend over the past few decades is open innovation. Interestingly this trend coincides with a substantial decline in R&D productivity. This paper examines whether these trends are related. Looking at one form of open innovation (R&D outsourcing), I find it increased by a factor of six...

We introduce and test a firm-level innovation-efficiency measure new to the finance literature. The measure, RQ, defined as the firm-specific output elasticity of R&D, was first developed in the management literature. RQ has low correlation with existing innovation input, output and efficiency...

A fundamental question in corporate strategy is how headquarters in multibusiness firms can create value above and beyond the burden of its own overhead. The leading theories from Chandler and Williamson hold this is possible through resource allocation across businesses. Yet there are...

One of the key mechanisms of firms' strategic renewal is Ramp;D, and a key driver of the intensity of Ramp;D is industry context. A number of theories develop propositions linking industry factors to firm Ramp;D behavior, but these theories lack consensus. To date empirical tests have been...