Date of Award

Fall 5-2018

Degree Type

Dissertation-Restricted

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Program

Financial Economics

Department

Economics and Finance

Major Professor

Dr. M. Kabir Hassan

Second Advisor

Dr. Neal Maroney

Third Advisor

Dr. Dugyu Zirek

Fourth Advisor

Dr. Tarun Mukherjee

Fifth Advisor

Dr. Linxiong Li

Abstract

The dissertation consists of two chapters on measuring firms technological profile. Patent data can be grouped into two primary generations. The first generation lead by the work of Schmookler (1966), Scherer (1982), and Griliches (1984), and the second generation led by Trajtenberg, Jaffe, and Henderson (1997) and Kogan et al. (2016). When combined, both generations data spans from nearly 1926-2010 and has made a meaningful impact on innovation research. In the first chapter, I propose a third generation of patent data. The third generation of patent data has two distinct contributions. First, it extends patent-firm ownership information beyond 2010 to 2016. The new dataset uses the established connections of previous datasets and builds on that information with additional data on firm names gathered from EDGAR. Second, it takes advantage of the information contained in the text of patents using text analysis. Using text analysis allows for greater flexibility over traditional measures. The second chapter investigates how ownership structure affects firm value. The previous literature has assumed more innovation is better, meaning the more innovation a business creates; the better off it is in the long-run. However, not all innovations are created equal. We contribute to the literature by investigating how institutional investors change future innovation, not in quantity, but diversity. Using several unique measures of technological diversification created from firm-level patent data, we show that institutional investors increase the focus on a firm’s future innovation. Our results are robust to the classification scheme. Ultimately, our results indicate institutional investors create value by encouraging firms to build on prior knowledge.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.

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