Trust and Innovation Within the Firm: Evidence from Matched CEO-Firm Data*

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nguyen, Kieu-Trang
• 署名单位: University of Melbourne
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjag013
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: research-and-development; ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE; technological-innovation; corruption culture; patent citations; transmission; incentives; Managers; GROWTH; institutions

摘要

This article shows that a CEO's trust enhances innovation within a firm, providing a novel micro-foundation for the well-known trust-growth relationship. I build a new matched CEO-firm-patent data set covering 5,753 CEOs in 3,598 U.S. public firms and 700,000 patents during 2000-2011. I exploit variation in generalized trust across CEO ethnic origins, inferred from their last names using deanonymized historical censuses. Following CEO turnovers, a one standard deviation increase in a CEO's generalized trust is associated with 6% more future patents and 4%-6% higher average patent quality, driven entirely by higher-quality patents. Text analysis of employee reviews shows that the CEO's trust enhances a firm's trust culture. These results are consistent with insights from qualitative interviews suggesting that the CEO's trust and the firm's trust culture encourage researchers to undertake high-risk explorative research and development. In addition, changes in the CEO's bilateral trust toward inventors in different countries have comparable effects on inventors' patenting, controlling for CEO and other fixed effects.