Incumbent Italian Firms Invest in Cronyism, Not Innovation

I heard an intriguing paper at the January 2020 AEA meetings in San Diego. It shows that, at least in Italy, big incumbent firms protect their position more through investment in cronyism than through investment in innovation. The abstract of the NBER working paper version of the paper appears below.

Do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We study Italian firms and their workers to answer this question. Our analysis uses a brand-new dataset, spanning the period from 1993 to 2014, where we merge: (i) firm-level balance sheet data; (ii) social security data on the universe of workers; (iii) patent data from the European Patent Office; (iv) the national registry of local politicians; and (v) detailed data on local elections in Italy. We find that firm-level political connections are widespread, especially among large firms, and that industries with a larger share of politically connected firms feature worse firm dynamics. We identify a leadership paradox: When compared to their competitors, market leaders are much more likely to be politically connected, but much less likely to innovate. In addition, political connections relate to a higher rate of survival, as well as growth in employment and revenue, but not in productivity – a result that we also confirm using a regression discontinuity design. We build a firm dynamics model, where we allow firms to invest in innovation and/or political connection to advance their productivity and to overcome certain market frictions. Our model highlights a new interaction between static gains and dynamic losses from rent-seeking in aggregate productivity.

The abstract quoted above is from:

Akcigit, Ufuk, Salome Baslandze, and Francesca Lotti. “Connecting to Power: Political Connections, Innovation, and Firm Dynamics.” NBER Working Paper #25136, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Oct. 2018.

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