文澜金融论坛（第313期）

摘要：

Because corporate limited liability protects founders' personal assets, creditors often require founders of new, small and risky firms to contract around limited liability by pledging their personal assets as collateral for loans to their firms. This makes personal bankruptcy law (PBL) relevant to corporate finance. We find that pro-debtor PBL reforms increase the number of patents filed, citations to those patents, and début patents by firms with no previous patents. These reforms also redistribute innovation across industries in closer alignment to its distribution in the U.S., which we take to approximate industry innovative potential. These effects are driven by firms without histories of high-intensity patenting, and are damped in countries that impose minimum capital requirements on new firms. Firms with largescale legacy technology may avoid radical innovations that devalue that technology. Consequently, new, initially small and risky firms often develop the disruptive innovations that contribute most to economic growth. Consistent with this, we also find pro-debtor PBL reforms increasing value-added growth rates across all industries, and by larger margins in industries with more innovation potential. Our difference-in-differences regressions use patents and PBL reforms for 33 countries from 1990 to 2002, with subsequent years used to measure citations to patents in this period.

主讲人介绍：

荣昭，中南财经政法大学文澜学院教授、博导。历任西南财经大学、南京审计大学副教授。研究领域包括企业创新、公司金融和人口流动，曾在《管理世界》、《经济学季刊》、《金融研究》、《科研管理》、《Research Policy》、《Small Business Economics》、《Journal of Comparative Economics》、《China Economic Review》、《European Financial Management》、《Pacific-Basin Finance Journal》、《Journal of Housing Economics》等国内外知名经济、金融、管理类SSCI、SCI学术期刊发表论文30余篇。