Narrow Results

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how investors perceive and respond to a firm's R&D announcement. We propose that board structure and intra-industry competition jointly dictate the announcement return. In addition, we assume that investors prefer carefully scrutinized R&D investments to mitigate asymmetric-information risks. Finally, we assume that investors prefer a sustainable R&D investment to prevent intense intra-industry competition and to ensure profit potential.

We use a sample of 229 announcements made by 116 Taiwanese listed firms to verify our postulation. Our postulation is the abnormal returns are positively correlated with board independence while negatively correlated with board size. We construct two variables to capture intra-industry competition: (i) the number of days that have elapsed since a competitor's prior announcement and (ii) the ordinal number of announcements in the same industry. Our results show that the announcement effect is negatively correlated with industry R&D intensity. The negative effect is partially ameliorated when the lapse since a prior competitor's announcement is long. Moreover, the announcement effect is also lower when the announcing firm has a high-level of R&D intensity and has experienced numerous prior R&D announcements in the same industry.

The emerging markets undergo constant transformations and changes, and thus, a change of strategy can be critical for companies. However, the impact of R&D investment on firm performance and the role of the board of directors that makes decisions about a company’s innovative activities remain inconclusive. This paper investigates the relationship between a board of directors’ composition and structure in innovative companies and firm performance. Using the panel data of innovative Russian public companies that made R&D investments in 2011–2013, we found a positive relationship between the boards’ independence and ROA as an indicator of firm performance. Moreover, it was shown that innovative companies that establish a strategy committee will on average have a higher ROA ratio than innovative companies without such a committee. Innovative firms in emerging markets might consider creating strategic committees and increasing board independence to enhance their performance and increase the number of successful R&D investments.

The main aim of the current paper is to analyse how the directors’ characteristics could influence innovation. We study specifically the effect of demographic attributes, such as age, gender, nationality, educational degree and academic background on innovation. Innovation is measured by (1) the firm’s ability to engender innovation in things such as new or improved product/process and the number of patents and (2) innovation expenditures, like, for example, R&D spending on innovative projects and the number of scientists and experts per R&D teams. This study is conducted on the firms listed on SBF120 index between 2002 and 2013. The SBF120 index consists of the 120 largest capitalisations listed on the French Stock Exchange market (SBF: Société des Bourses Françaises). It provides the following results. First, the presence of women on the board positively influences product innovations while the presence of independent directors fosters the number of patents and process innovations. Secondly, highly educated directors can better understand complex decisions and absorb new ideas and technologies, which increase innovative products. Regarding the academic degree, we highlight that business educated directors seem to marginalise innovation investments as they are more likely to focus on activities with short-term financial returns. Then, directors of different ethnic, cultural backgrounds and different nationalities seem to stimulate a firm to improve or develop new products. Moreover, older directors are less risk-tolerant than younger ones: they invest less in risky R&D investments. By looking at the impact of various types of directors’ characteristics on innovation, and by taking into account various types of innovation; this paper brings practical insights to board structures issues. This paper contributes to the debate on the urgent need to increase the firms’ capacity to appoint on board individuals displaying diverse types of knowledge, abilities, skills and networking that could drive more innovations.

We provide arguments and present evidence that corporate governance structures are composed of interrelated mechanisms, which are in turn endogenous responses to the costs and benefits firms face when they choose those mechanisms. Examining board structures and the use of corporate charter provisions in a sample of more than 2,300 firms over a four-year period, we find that firms cluster in their use of governance mechanisms. In particular, the set of charter provisions that firms use, as measured by the Gompers et al. (2003) G Index, is associated with board structure, with the laws of the state in which the firm is incorporated, and with firm and industry characteristics. We also find that some governance structures appear to serve as substitutes. Specifically, firms that have powerful boards (as measured by board independence) also have the greatest number of charter provisions, suggesting that the market for corporate control is less effective as a monitoring mechanism for these firms. In contrast, firms that have less powerful boards tend to have few charter provisions, suggesting that the market for corporate control plays a greater monitoring role at such firms. To address potential endogeneity issues, we employ three-stage least squares analysis to estimate these relationships within a system of equations. Our results from this analysis are consistent with the hypothesis that powerful boards serve as a substitute for the market for corporate control. Finally, our findings suggest that causality runs from the board to the choice of charter provisions, but not vice versa.

Research and development is an emerging competitive advantage to gain maximum market share. This study is conducted to empirically investigate the relationship between research and development intensity and firm performance in selected non-financial firms listed at Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). Moreover, the role of ownership structure and board structure have been evaluated between predictor and outcome variable. For this purpose, 27 non-financial firms listed on PSX have been selected for the period of eight years from 2009 to 2016 and unbalanced panel data was obtained. Research and development intensity has been used as an independent variable. ROA, ROE, and TQ are used as measures of financial performance, i.e., dependent variable. Ownership concentration, institutional ownership, and managerial ownership are used as the proxies for ownership structure. Board size, board independence, and board meeting frequency are used as the proxies for board structure. Moreover, firm size, firm age and leverage have also been used as a control variables in data analysis. Based on data analyses, it is concluded that research and development intensity has a positive and significant relationship with all three proxies of firm performance, i.e., ROA, ROE and Tobin’s Q. Afterward, the researchers have investigated the moderating role of ownership structure and board structure between research and development intensity and three proxies of firm performance. It is also concluded that in general ownership structure as well as board structure are negatively moderating the relationship between research and development intensity and firm performance which raises a question mark on the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanism in terms of R&D performance.