We show that wrongful discharge laws - laws that inhibit the common-law doctrine of "employment-at-will" - spur innovation. In our model, wrongful discharge laws make it costly for firms to arbitrarily discharge employees. This enables firms to commit to not punish short-run failures of...

Stringent labor laws can provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing innovative activities. Using patents and citations as proxies for innovation, we identify this effect by exploiting the time-series variation...

We show that wrongful discharge laws - laws that protect employees against unjust dismissal - spur innovation and new firm creation. Wrongful discharge laws, particularly those that prohibit employers from acting in bad faith ex post, limit employers' ability to hold up innovating employees...

We argue that when bankruptcy code is creditor friendly, excessive liquidations cause levered firms to shun innovation, whereas by promoting continuation upon failure, a debtor-friendly code induces greater innovation. We provide empirical support for this claim by employing patents as a proxy...

We develop a theory to show how external and internal corporate governance mechanisms affect innovation. We show that there is a U-shaped relation between innovation and external takeover pressure, which arises from the interaction between expected takeover premia and private benefits of...

We show that finance influences innovation by young private firms, an important source of long-term economic growth. We develop a simple theoretical model that predicts that a decrease (increase) in banks' bargaining power vis-a-vis entrepreneurs increases (decreases) both the volume and...