题目：Personal Bankruptcy Law and Innovation around the World

个人破产法与创新：基于跨国研究的证据

主讲人：荣昭

时间：2024 年 9 月9 日 下午14:30-16:00

地点：北京师范大学珠海校区励耘楼 B312

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.

公司有限责任制度的设计旨在保护创始人的个人资产。然而，为了规避有限责任带来的风险，债权人通常要求新创企业的创始人将个人资产作为公司贷款的抵押物。因此，个人破产法（PBL）在公司金融中具有重要意义。我们的研究表明，对债务人友好的PBL改革不仅增加了专利申请的数量和这些专利的引用次数，还促使之前没有专利记录的企业首次申请专利。这些改革还促使创新在不同行业之间的分布更加接近美国的行业创新潜力分布。上述效应主要存在于缺乏高强度专利产出历史的企业，而在那些企业最低注册资本有要求的国家，这些效应较弱。掌握大量现有技术的企业可能会回避那些导致其技术贬值的颠覆性创新。因此，初创企业往往是推动经济增长的颠覆性创新的主要来源。我们的研究还发现，PBL改革提高了各行业的附加值增长率，尤其是在创新潜力较大的行业中。我们的双重差分回归分析基于33个国家在1990年至2002年的专利和PBL改革数据，并利用随后的年份数据来衡量这一时期专利的引用情况。

个人简介：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、人口流动。于《Research Policy》、《Small Business Economics》、《Journal of Comparative Economics》、《China Economic Review》、《European Financial Management》、《Pacific-Basin Finance Journal》、《Journal of Housing Economics》、《管理世界》、《经济学季刊》、《金融研究》、《科研管理》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。