Prévue : Kolade OKE

Jury

Abstract

Innovation occupies a paradoxical position in corporate finance: universally recognized as the principal engine of long-run growth, yet the very firms that generate it, those with intangible, hard-to-collateralize assets and uncertain future payoffs, pose some of the most persistent unresolved problems in financial economics. This dissertation investigates how this tension plays out at three stages of an innovative firm's financing lifecycle: the initial R&D financing decision, the market's subsequent pricing of firms once their innovation becomes observable, and the contractual terms firms negotiate when they turn to hybrid securities. Each stage is the subject of one of the dissertation's three papers, using evidence from the United States, Europe, and Korea. Paper 1 asks whether innovation reduces leverage, and how this varies with the institutional and macro environment. Using a panel of US and European firms, it finds patent intensity negatively and significantly associated with both market and book leverage, surviving instrumental-variable estimation. Citation-based innovation quality is priced asymmetrically, affecting market leverage in the US but not Europe, and book leverage in both regions, more strongly in Europe. The innovation-leverage relationship also weakens significantly during periods of GDP growth. Paper 2 asks whether the market rewards innovation intensity linearly, and finds that it does not. Sorting firms into six portfolios by patent density reveals an Inverted-U relationship between innovation intensity and abnormal returns: mean returns and Fama-French three-factor alphas rise from the lowest to a high-but-not-extreme portfolio, then decline at the highest innovation intensities. This premium decays from a Sharpe ratio of 0.24 at one year to indistinguishable from zero by three years, consistent with gradual price incorporation rather than a compensated risk factor. Chow tests reject homogeneity between US and European portfolios, a divergence traced to an Innovation Efficiency Ratio showing that US firms convert R&D spending into patented output roughly 3.5 times more efficiently than European firms. Paper 3 turns to the convertible bond market in Korea, one of the world's most active among small and mid-cap innovative issuers, and asks how R&D intensity is priced into the conversion premium. Consistent with the risk-uncertainty theory of Brennan and Kraus, R&D intensity is positively and significantly associated with the conversion premium, and this relationship is concentrated among unprofitable issuers and high-technology firms, where risk is hardest to assess. Robustness checks rule out a mechanical option-pricing explanation. The relationship does not survive a within-firm fixed-effects test, indicating persistent, firm-level differences in risk opacity rather than a mechanical year-to-year response. Read together, the three papers trace a single arc, and their unifying contribution is a distinction between two forms of information asymmetry that prior literature has often conflated: asymmetry about a firm's expected value, and asymmetry about the uncertainty surrounding that value, its risk. The latter, developed by Brennan and Kraus for convertible bonds and by Halov and Heider for capital structure, is shown here to be the more relevant friction throughout an innovative firm's financing lifecycle: it pushes innovative firms toward equity at the point of initial financing (Paper 1), is only partially resolved once these firms are priced by public markets (Paper 2), and is directly renegotiated into contract terms where institutions permit firm-specific bargaining (Paper 3). A second principle emerges across all three papers: the financial consequences of innovation are jointly determined by what these firms are and by the institutional architecture, market-based or bank-based, centralized or bilaterally negotiated, of the markets in which they raise capital, are priced, and contract.