R&D profitability: the role of risk and Knightian uncertainty
首次实证检验奈特对不确定性与风险的区分，分析风险与不确定性如何影响企业研发投资回报和利润，发现不确定性会导致研发回报异质性。
This paper provides the first empirical attempt of linking firms’ profits and investment in R&D revisiting Knight’s (Risk, uncertainty and profit, Hart, Schaffner & Marx, Boston, 1921) distinction between uncertainty and risk. Along with the risky profit-maximising scenario, identifying a second, off-setting, unpredictable bias that leads to heterogeneous returns to R&D investments is crucial to fully understand the drivers of corporate profits. Consistently with the Knightian theory that relates risk to profitability, we model the impact of risk and uncertainty on profits and provide a first empirical attempt to model the effect of ambiguity, a particular type of uncertainty, on R&D returns.