Monitoring by institutional investors can act as an important mechanism to promote firm innovation. By investigating Chinese listed firms' patenting between 2002 and 2011, we find that the presence of institutional investors enhances firm innovation. Consistent with the monitoring view, we...

China recently surpassed the USA as the greatest global source of patent applications. However, without internationally comparable measures of patent quality it remains questionable whether China's patent expansion constitutes the rise of a new technological superpower. Our novel quality index...

In the past years Chinese firms increased their spending on R&D substantially and worked on achieving a higher quality level of R&D. We analyze whether different R&D activities show a positive influence on total factor productivity (TFP) for firms of different ownership types and across two time...

This study investigates the allocation of China's R&D subsidies and its effectiveness in stimulating firms' own R&D investments for the population of Chinese listed firms throughout the time period 2001 to 2006. For allocation, we find that firm participation is determined by prior grants, high...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, comprehensive, accurate, and timely digital contact tracing serves as a decisive measure in curbing viral transmission. Such a strategy integrates corporate innovation, government decision-making, citizen participation, and community coordination with big data...

In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and Germany, using detailed firm-level data spanning three decades. Our results indicate that...

We investigate the misappropriation of R&D subsidies and evaluate its consequences for policy effectiveness. Using Chinese firm-level data for 2001-2011, we identify that 42% of grantees misused R&D subsidies, accounting for 53% of total R&D subsidies. Misappropriation leads to a substantial...