Firm boundaries matter: Evidence from conglomerates and R&D activity
企业边界的重要性：来自多元化企业集团与研发活动的证据
This paper examines the impact of the conglomerate form on the scale and novelty of corporate Research and Development (R&D) activity. I exploit a quasi-experiment involving failed mergers to generate exogenous variation in acquisition outcomes of target firms. A difference-in-differences estimation reveals that, relative to failed targets, firms acquired in diversifying mergers produce both a smaller number of innovations and also less-novel innovations, where innovations…