IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/baf/cbafwp/cbafwp1872.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Government Share Ownership and Innovation: Evidence from European Listed Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Bernardo Bortolotti
  • Veljko Fotak
  • Brian Wolfe

Abstract

We investigate the impact of government ownership on the innovativeness of European listed firms. We find that firms with minority government stakes invest more in research and development (R&D) than private firms, thanks to relaxed financial constraints. However, firms with majority government stakes invest less due to short-term political priorities distorting managerial objectives and incentives. Our results are robust to propensity score matching and instrumental variables to account for omitted variable bias and the endogenous nature of government ownership. On the output side, despite the higher investment in R&D, minority government ownership has no discernable impact on patent quantity and quality, as measured by citations. Our results indicate that government ownership is not an efficient policy to promote innovation in listed firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Bernardo Bortolotti & Veljko Fotak & Brian Wolfe, 2018. "Government Share Ownership and Innovation: Evidence from European Listed Firms," BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers 1872, BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy.
  • Handle: RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp1872
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repec.unibocconi.it/baffic/baf/papers/cbafwp1872.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Landoni, Matteo, 2020. "Knowledge creation in state-owned enterprises," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 77-85.
    2. Hurtak, Stefan & Kashyap, Vishal & Ehret, Michael, 2022. "Lightening the dark side of customer participation – The mitigating role of relationship performance in business-to-business project contexts," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 220-231.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Innovation; R&D; state ownership;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
    • G38 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Government Policy and Regulation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp1872. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michela Pozzi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cbbocit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.