The Bright Side of Political Uncertainty: The Case of R&D
利用省级官员换届选举作为准自然实验，发现政治不确定性反而促进企业研发投入，与对资本投资的抑制效应相反，且在高科技和政治敏感行业更显著。
Abstract We use close gubernatorial elections as a quasi-natural experiment to document a positive effect of political uncertainty on firm-level R&D. This finding is in contrast to the existing literature documenting a negative impact of political uncertainty on capital investment. We examine potential mechanisms and find that our results are consistent with the growth option view of R&D investment. The effect is stronger for politically sensitive and high-tech industries.The results are robust to different proxies for political uncertainty shocks. As predicted by models of investment under uncertainty, the real effects of political uncertainty critically depend on the type of the investment. JEL G18, G38, O31, O32