Impact of CEOs’ Academic Work Experience on Firms’ Innovation Output and Performance: Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review Report Sustainability 916145

Dear Authors,

I have carefully read your article that identifies the connection between CEO’s academic experience and firm performance. Here are my major comments.

1. Introduction

You argue that “…little has been done to investigate the correlation between CEO-specific background or experience and innovation output and firm performance.” Is there any meta-study or review to support this argument? I searched literature by the keywords CEO experience, innovation, there is plenty of literature. Please cite some articles in leading journals to support your argument, or rephrase the research gap.

2. Theoretical Foundations and Hypothesis Development,

Please explain why ownership is relevant and moderating role of managerial incentives and innovation input in the introduction part. Otherwise, it comes suddenly.

Furthermore, please change the subtitles 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 to “moderating roles of X on the correlation between Y and Z.

You argue that “Owing to the institutional and administrative particularity of university and research institution in China, most R&D activities are funded by the government” (line 180-181), this is not true. China’s R&D mainly comes from firms. In 2016, Chinese firms contributed 78% to national R&D expenditure.

You argue that “Since Griliches [43] being the first to investigate the correlation between innovation and firm performance (line 188)”. This is not true. Griliches (1990) is a survey article; it did not investigate the correlation.

You argue that “several studies have used empirical analysis to test this concept” (line 189). What are the several studies? Please list references.

4. Results

What I missed? Cannot understand why you discuss American firms “The average R&D intensity of America-listed  firms was 0.055 during 1993-2011, and it is still growing in the last few decades. We found a significant gap in innovation input between Chinese firms and American firms.”

I am confused by the significance of gender in table 5. can you explain this?

One question about your observations. Why model 1has 1210 samples, model 5 has 1162 samples?

5. discussion

What is this? please delete. “Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible. Future research directions may also be highlighted.” (lines 415-417).

Here are minor comments

 I was confused a bit by the current title, and it would be no harm if change it as “… firm’s innovation output and performance”.

Reference is out of date, and please add more literature published in the last five years.

English can be improved. For example, tense is not consistent throughout the paper.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

As the research regards the specific context of Chinese market the Authors should clearly indicate this fact both in the title and the Abstract of the paper.

The Authors should justify the selection of regression methods applied, in particular they should demonstrate that the analysed data satisfy the proper assumptions for those methods.

The lag between explanatory and dependent variables appears rather short, as the innovation process (i.e. the time between the launch of a given R&D project and the corresponding patent application) is likely to take more than 1 year. Therefore the Authors should justify the selected length of the lag window.

The analysis of individual correlations between explanatory variables, provided in Table 3, seems not sufficient because since the Authors apply multiple-regression models they should directly address the issue of potential multicollinearity of explanatory variables (i.e. using VIF method).

The ‘Discussion’ section should be separated from ‘Conclusions’ and it should present direct references to the results of prior studies in the relevant literature.  

The paper requires proof-reading with respect to grammar, wording and style.

The lines 415-417 seem unnecessary.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

1. There is a reference cited in the text (at rows 100-101), in a different format. I think it  should be number, not authors' name. The same observation, on the row 213. Moreover, the latter one does not appear in the list of references.

2. At the rows 253 it is mentioned Hypothesis 6 (H6), but it should be the Hypothesis 7 (H7). 

3. Maybe it could be useful to write the full name, not the abbreviation, for CSMAR (row 258), especially since it is used only once in the text.

4. The models are not clearly displayed. Although they are numbered, this numbering is rather ambiguous. Maybe it would be better that the numbering to be placed at the right margin of the page, and not next to the formula of the model.

5. The models 9 and 10 are not detailed. The models 7 and 8 are explained. What about 9 and 10?

6. The first paragraph of Section 5 (Discussion and Conclusions), i.e. rows 415-417 must be deleted. It gives some general indications to the authors. It probably was left by mistake from the paper format.

7. In the list of references, the references 68 and 69 (rows 688-689) need to be revised. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

this paper has been improved a lot for publication.