Creditor rights and innovation: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

In 2016, the Government of India (GoI) implemented the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), a reform aimed at enhancing creditor rights by enabling creditors to swiftly ‘seize’ and ‘liquidate’ a defaulter’s assets within a defined timeframe. This reform was designed to strengthen creditor protections in India. Our study examines the impact of this reform on firm-level innovation. We hypothesize that creditor-friendly reforms improve access to debt capital, thereby encouraging firms to intensify their innovation activities. Utilizing an entropy-balanced difference-in-differences (Entropy-DiD) approach and leveraging pre-reform variation in firms’ ‘proportion of debt’ for identification, we find that firms with a lower pre-reform ‘proportion of debt’ increased their R&D investment by 29.4 % more than firms with a higher pre-reform ‘proportion of debt’ in the post-IBC period. Supporting our baseline result, we further document that this effect is stronger among more profitable firms within the ‘treated’ group. Our findings are robust to firm-level time-varying control variables, fixed effects for firm and industry by year, and a placebo test using a fictitious IBC promulgation year. These results indicate that stronger creditor rights foster an environment conducive to risk-taking, encouraging firms to pursue ventures that, while risky, hold significant potential for profitability. Consequently, our research highlights the welfare implications of creditor-friendly bankruptcy reforms, providing insights that could inform future policy decisions.