企业投资决策趋同:“羊群效应”抑或“同伴效应”?——来自中国非金融上市公司的面板数据

Convergence of Corporate Investment: “Herd Behavior” or “Peer Effects”?Panel Data from China’s Non-financial Listed Companies

模仿、跟随同类企业财务决策并非一定是管理者非理性盲从或维护声誉及薪酬的"羊群效应"结果。同伴效应假说指出,在复杂多变的外部环境中生存和发展,企业具有从同伴企业获取信息、学习其决策行为的需求。为解决识别同伴效应时面临的联立性问题以及区域因素、行业政策的关联性影响,本文以2008—2015年中国非金融上市企业为样本,以跨区域的行业企业作为同伴企业,构建了同伴企业的同区域非相关行业企业投资均值作为工具变量,使用2SLS方法对企业投资决策同伴效应及影响因素进行实证检验。研究发现:中国上市企业投资决策具有同伴效应;同伴企业的规模优势特征、焦点企业高管学习能力以及行业经营风险是影响投资决策同伴效应的重要因素。在改变同伴效应模型设定、替换工具变量以及排除委托代理的替代性解释等稳健性检验后,研究结论依然稳健。本文丰富了企业财务决策同伴效应的相关研究,对正确理解企业之间的投资决策互动关系具有重要价值和现实意义。

Imitating and following other’s financial decisions maybe not due to herd behavior which is related with managers’blending with the crowd or agency conflicts.While peer effects hypothesis points out that in the complex and changeable environment,firms need to obtain information from peers and learn from their financial decisions.When identifying peer effects,in order to mitigate the simultaneous problem and the influence of regional factors and industrial policies,this paper use the sample data of China’s non-financial listed companies from 2008 to 2015,choose withinindustry and cross-region firms as focal firm’s non-local peers,and construct peers’local uncorrelated firms’average investment as instrument variables.This empirical results using 2 SLS method show that firstly,firms’investment actively responds to the investment of their peers;secondly,the influence of peers is stronger when the scale of peers is larger,and when the learning abilities of focal firm’s managers are high,and when the industry risk is high.After changing the model settings,substituting instrumental variables and excluding the alternative explanation,the results are still robust.This paper enriches the study on peer effects of financial decision-making,which is helpful for understanding the interactions between firms’investment decisions.