Using a difference-indifference approach, we study how intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects innovation in China in the years around the privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Innovation increases after SOE privatizations, and this increase is larger in cities with strong IPR protection. Our results support theoretical arguments that IPR protection strengthens firms' incentives to innovate and that private sector firms are more sensitive to IPR protection than SOEs.

Using a unique and rich database of high-technology firms in China, we show that effective enforcement of intellectual property rights at the provincial level is critical in encouraging financing and investing in R&D. Better enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights positively affects firms' ability to acquire new external debt and allows firms to invest in more R&D, generate more innovation patents, and produce more sales from new products. Our results suggest that facilitating financing and investing in R&D are the channels through which better IP rights enforcement can affect economic growth.

How does trust affect business contracting at the firm level? We analyze the case of foreign high-tech companies investing in China, where the risk of expropriation of their intellectual property is high. We find that firms mitigate this type of risk by taking local trustworthiness into account when making investment decisions. Firms prefer to invest in regions where local partners and employees are considered more trustworthy; they are also more likely to establish joint ventures and to make greater research and development investments. We employ instrumental variable regressions and dynamic panel generalized method of moments estimators to alleviate endogeneity concerns and control for time-invariant heterogeneity.

Using a difference-in-difference approach, we study how intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects innovation in China in the years around the privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Innovation increases after SOE privatizations, and this increase is larger in cities with strong IPR protection. Our results support theoretical arguments that IPR protection strengthens firms' incentives to innovate and that private sector firms are more sensitive to IPR protection than SOEs.

We examine whether social media criticisms posted by small investors can predict subsequent firm acquisition decisions. Specifically, we use textual analysis to examine the Internet stock message board postings of 303 value-reducing acquisition attempts. Our empirical evidence shows that small investors' negative postings are able to predict a potential acquirer's subsequent decision to withdraw its attempt. We further find that this predictive ability increases with the information quality of postings, and that the predictive information extracted from social media is incremental to that captured by proposal announcement returns, conventional media coverage, analyst reports, and institutional investors' responses related to the proposed acquisition. Finally, we show that message board criticisms are also able to predict governance outcomes beyond acquisition decisions. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that social media play a role in corporate governance by gathering crowd wisdom and uncovering additional value-relevant information.