Badawy, Mohamed and Ghaly, Mohamed and Boyallian, Patricia (2024) Essays on the Role of Inventors on Corporate Boards. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
![[thumbnail of 2023BadawyPhD]](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png)
Abstract
This thesis consist of two self-contained studies in the area of empirical corporate finance. The first essay examines how directors with patenting expertise affect corporate innovation. We find strong evidence of a positive relation between inventor-directors and firm innovation. Firms with inventors on their boards spend more on R&D, generate more patents, and their patents receive a higher number of citations and have greater economic value. The effects are stronger when inventor-directors are active and more influential. Additionally, we find that firms with inventor-directors are more likely to engage in radical and explorative innovations across a wider array of technology classes. Our results shed light on the importance of directors’ innovation experience in facilitating firms’ innovation efforts. The second essay studies the impact of female inventor-directors on the performance of female inventors within firms. We find that female directors with innovation (patenting) experience are positively related to the patenting performance of a firm’s female inventors as measured by the number, citations, value, and importance of patents they file. Firms with female inventor-directors employ more female inventors, who are more productive, and have a greater contribution to firm innovation. Further results show that the innovation productivity gender gap between male and female inventors shrinks with the presence of female inventor-directors. These effects are more pronounced when the female director is a star inventor.