Innovation and Industry Selection

Abstract

We use a novel dataset of company-level innovation measures to identify the most innovative industries based on counts of their applications for foreign worker visas and their patent applications and grants. We are able to build portfolios which overweight these innovative industries and which generate economically significant excess returns, especially in the 2013-2018 period, with low turnover. The results do not appear to be fully explained by risk factors, and the same innovation measures do not predict returns at the single stock level.