Daniel Chi (Finance) had his recent research on how language affects R&D investment featured in  Harvard Business Review (HBR). In each issue, HBR highlights the findings of three to four notable research papers in its Idea Watch section. This paper, “Is Language an Economic Institution? Evidence from R&D Investment,” was recently published by the Journal of Corporate Finance.  The study shows that how a language describes the future affects the speaker’s perception about the timing of future events and has important economic consequences. For example, some languages have obligatory future tense, such as English; some languages don’t, such as Japanese or German. For countries whose languages don’t have future tense, R&D investment and innovation output are higher.  The study identifies the economic mechanisms of this language effect. The paper is coauthored with Xunhua Su (Norwegian School of Economics), Bin Xu (University of Leeds), and Yun Tang (OECD).