Prior research finds that risk-taking has declined after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, consistent with the notion that SOX's corporate governance and internal control mandates diverted resources away from corporate risk-taking. We introduce to the accounting literature a new measure of R&D productivity, Research Quotient, to examine whether SOX affects R&D risk-taking and R&D productivity differently and whether the quality of the firm's governance and internal controls, pre-SOX, moderate these relations. While we find the relation between SOX and R&D risk-taking is sensitive to research design choices, we find a consistent positive relation between SOX and Research Quotient. Our evidence indicates that while firms may allocate fewer resources to R&D post-SOX, they concurrently manage their R&D investments more productively. Further, our results are robust to a difference-in-difference design and are stronger for firms with weaker governance pre-SOX.

先前的研究发现，在 2002 年萨班斯-奥克斯利法案之后，风险承担有所下降，这与 SOX 的公司治理和内部控制要求将资源从公司风险承担转移出去的观点是一致的。我们在会计文献中引入了一种新的研发生产力衡量指标研究商数，以检验 SOX 对研发风险承担和研发生产力的影响是否不同，以及公司治理和内部控制的质量（SOX 之前）是否会缓和这些关系。虽然我们发现 SOX 与研发风险承担之间的关系对研究设计选择很敏感，但我们发现 SOX 与研究商数之间存在一致的正相关关系。我们的证据表明，虽然公司可能会在 SOX 后分配更少的资源进行研发，但它们同时管理其研发 D 投资更有成效。此外，我们的结果对差异中的差异设计是稳健的，并且对于 SOX 之前治理较弱的公司来说更强大。