CEOs’ political ideologies and innovation: Evidence from US public firms

Abstract

Abstract Using both the number of patents and the number of citations that the patents receive as the measures of innovation and using political donations as an indicator of the chief executive officer (CEO)’s political preferences, we find that (1) firms led by CEOs with and without political partisanship show no differences in terms of innovation outputs; and (2) there are no differences between firms led by Republican and Democratic CEOs when it comes to innovation. The results are robust to a propensity-score-matching regression, a firm fixed effect regression, and alternate measures of innovation. Overall, the results suggest that CEOs’ personal political ideologies do not significantly affect their innovation decisions.