Do firms with foreign residency rights controlling shareholders reduce R&D investment?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baoyin Qiu ◽  
Bo Cheng ◽  
Hangeng Qiu ◽  
Kam C. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Controlling Shareholders ◽  
D Investment

Ownership structure and R&D investment: the role of identity and contestability in Spanish listed firms

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 405-426
Author(s):  
Laura García-García ◽  
Macarena Gonzalo Alonso-Buenaposada ◽  
M. Elena Romero-Merino ◽  
Marcos Santamaria-Mariscal
Keyword(s):  
Ownership Structure ◽  
Family Firms ◽  
Institutional Investor ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Controlling Shareholders ◽  
Listed Firms ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
D Investment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the ownership structure and the investment in research and development (R&D) for a sample of listed Spanish companies.Design/methodology/approachFollowing the agency theory and the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective, the authors propose that R&D investment is affected by ownership structure, specifically by the identity of the controlling owner (family firms and firms with an institutional investor) and the level of contestability by other shareholders. In order to test these hypotheses, the authors build an original database identifying, at a 10% threshold, the ultimate shareholders of a sample of 96 Spanish firms listed during 2008–2018 (1,002 obs).FindingsThe results show that there is no significant relationship between the ownership concentration and the R&D investment. Only when the authors consider the nature of the main shareholder, the authors find that in family firms there is an inverted U relationship between ownership and R&D, so that at low levels of ownership, the R&D increases, while at high levels of ownership (that we compute around 54%) the R&D decreases. Also, when the main shareholder is an institutional investor, the greater its ownership, the higher the R&D investment. Finally, the authors test that, contrary to what mainstream suggests, contestability in family firms is higher when ownership in the hands of other family shareholders increases.Originality/valueThe work uses an original database to test a nonlinear relationship between ownership and R&D investment in family firms. Also, the study addresses a topic hardly ever discussed in the literature about R&D as it is the role of the contestability by other controlling shareholders.

The relation between R&D accounting treatment and the risk of the firm: Evidence from the Italian market

2014 ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riccardo Cimini ◽  
Alessandro Gaetano ◽  
Alessandra Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Earnings Management ◽  
Fiscal Year ◽  
Investment Strategies ◽  
Capital Assets ◽  
Italian Market ◽  
D Investment ◽  
Firm Evidence

In this paper, we investigate the relation between the different accounting treatments of R&D expenditures and the risk of the entity in order to identify under which treatment insiders are more likely to carry out earnings management. By analysing the R&D investment strategies of a sample of 137 listed Italian entities that complied with the requirements of IAS 38 during fiscal year 2009, following Lantz and Sahut (2005), we calculate several indexes that show the preferences of insiders to account R&D expenditures as costs or capital assets, and we study the relation of such preferences with the risk of the entity, which we measure with the unlevered beta. We hypothesize that the entities, which considered the R&D investments as costs, are the riskiest ones due to the higher probability that insiders carried out earnings management. Our results confirm such hypothesis. This paper could have implications for academics and standard setters that could learn that behind accounting discretion, insiders could opportunistically behave against outsiders.

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