How is Moral Hazard Related to Financing R&D and Innovations?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate how moral hazard arises during financing R&D and technological innovation activities of firms through their corporate governance attributes and firm-specific characteristics. We study 106 firms that received a specially designed loan by a Turkish government to be invested only in R&D and technological innovations. We find that as the size of the loan increases firms are less prone to moral hazard. For family firms our results support the agency theory. For large shareholders, initially our results are aligned with the agency theory but after controlling for the loan size our results hold for the stewardship theory. Finally we find that as amount of the loans increases relative to size of firms, the performance of projects financed by these loans plummets. Finally, we show that moral hazard related to R&D and innovation activities varies across industries.