This study explores the effect of CEO birth order on corporate innovation. Using hand-collected data, we find that firms led by firstborn CEOs are less innovative. This finding survives a number of robustness checks. When firms are more risky, non-state-owned or less financially constrained, the association between birth order and innovation is stronger, suggesting that the negative impact of firstborn CEOs is larger when their innovative personality is more demanding or influential. Meanwhile, firstborn CEOs have larger impact on corporate innovation when they are born in cities where Confucian culture are more influential or grow up in a low-income family, consistent with our argument that sibling competition makes firstborns less innovative. Overall, our results suggest that firstborn CEOs have negative effect on corporate innovation because they are less innovative intrinsically.

中文翻译：

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为创新而生？CEO对企业创新的出生顺序效应

本研究探讨了 CEO 出生顺序对企业创新的影响。使用手工收集的数据，我们发现由长子 CEO 领导的公司的创新性较低。这一发现经受了许多稳健性检验。当公司风险更大、非国有或财务约束更少时，出生顺序与创新之间的关联更强，这表明当他们的创新个性更高或更有影响力时，长子 CEO 的负面影响更大。同时，当长子 CEO 出生在儒家文化影响较大的城市或成长于低收入家庭时，他们对企业创新的影响更大，这与我们的观点一致，即兄弟姐妹竞争使长子的创新能力降低。全面的，