管理层持股对创新绩效的影响机理研究--基于融资约束的中介作用

A research on the effect mechanism of managerial ownership on innovation performance -- The mediating role based on financial constraints

本文以我国上市公司2012-2015的样本为对象,使用Hadlock等(2010)的SA指数构建了融资约束虚拟变量,通过递归模型实证研究了融资约束在管理层持股对公司研发投资和研发效率影响中的中介作用。结论显示管理层持股与融资约束是高度显著的U型关系,但与研发投资和创新效率则是高度显著的倒U型关系,融资约束在管理层持股对创新绩效的影响中显著地发挥了部分中介作用,但这种中介效应针对研发投资和创新效率各不相同,管理层股权激励对提高研发效率的作用受到限制,而且管理层持股对融资约束和创新绩效的影响主要局限于非国有控股上市公司。本文的研究结论为明确我国公司管理层持股对公司创新的影响路径提供了新的证据,也为改进股权激励以提高公司创新绩效提供了有益参考。

In 2015, China put forward the economic development strategy of "mass innovation", and various regions and enterprises all responded to the call positively, this leads to a rapid growth of R&D investment in enterprises and society. According to a recent statistics, China′s R&D investment in 2017 has reached 1.75 trillion yuan after decades of development, which ranked the second largest in the world, and is only lower than the United States. However, in terms of R&D efficiency, the results is not satisfactory, as there are few patents with worldwide influence, thus how to improve China′s R&D efficiency has become a question of common concern. Management shareholding is the main content of corporate equity incentive. As existing research shows, equity incentive can lead to consistent interests of executives and shareholders, thus it can effectively alleviate the conflict of interests between principals and agents, and reduce the agency cost of the company. At present, there are three main views on the impact of managerial ownership on the innovation performance of companies at home and abroad. One is that managerial equity incentive can reduce the conflict of interest between management and shareholders, thus produces "interest convergence effect", this will spur the management to invest more in high-risk innovation projects for the long term interest of company, and promote the innovation performance of companies. The second view is the "risk averse theory", which believe that because of the pursuit of career stability, the risk averse management will make short-term decision and allocate more resources to low-risk innovation projects rather than high-risk innovation projects, thus the management ownership is inversely proportional to innovation performance. The third view is based on the "interest convergence effect" and "entrenchment effect" of managerial ownership, which believes that the impact of managerial ownership on corporate innovation performance is a typically inverted U-shaped relationship. Due to the serious information asymmetry and other characteristics of innovation activities, innovation activities are easy to be affected by financing constraints, but different from the existing research that regards financing constraints as exogenous environment variables, as financing constraints are subject to corporate decision and performance, they are regarded as endogenous variables in this paper. Based on the 2012-2015 sample of China′s listed companies, we construct a virtual variable of financing constraints(SAI) by using the SA index suggested by Hadlock et al.(2010), and using recursive model to make empirical study on the intermediary effect of financing constraints between financing constraints and R&D investment and R&D efficiency. For robustness test in this paper we also use the Z-Score value proposed by Altman in 1968 to replace SAI, and at the same time, we replaced the innovation efficiency index by the natural logarithm of the total effective patent, which is obtained by weighting method, the weight of for invention patent, utility model and design patent of each corporate is 0.5, 0.3 and 0.2 respectively, after the replacement, we reached the same results, which verifies the robustness of the main results of this paper.Finally, we reached the following conclusions in this paper: Firstly, there are highly significant U-shaped relationship between managerial ownership and financing constraints, and highly significant inverted U-shaped relationship between corporate innovation performances, financing constraints play a significant partly intermediary role between management′s shareholding and corporate R&D efficiency. Secondly, the intermediary roles financing constraints play is different in the impact of management ownership on R & D investment and R & D efficiency. Among them, the intermediary impact of financing constraints on R&D investment aggravate the rise or fall of R&D investment, while the intermediary impact of financing constraints on R&D efficiency delay the rise or fall of R&D efficiency, it also shows that the role of management equity incentive in improving R&D efficiency is limited. Thirdly, financing constraints have a highly significant inhibitory effect on R&D investment and a highly significant promoting effect on R & D efficiency. Fourthly, the impact of equity incentive on corporate financing constraints and innovation performance is only limited to non-state-owned listed companies at present, and there′s no similar effect on state-owned enterprises. The conclusion of this paper has important theoretical and policy significance. In theory, it provides a new evidence for the impact of corporate ownership structure on innovation performance, and verifies that financing constraint, as an ultimate constraint mechanism of capital market, has a significant constraint on corporate management. In terms of policy recommendations, as financing constraints will aggravate the impact of managerial ownership on R&D investment, but will delay or limit the impact of managerial ownership on R&D efficiency, especially in the case of loose external financing, the R&D investment of companies with more managerial ownership will increase significantly, but its R&D efficiency will not be improved accordingly, which may indicate that the management may use company′s free cash flow and other resources to invest in R&D projects with low value or not related to the company′s expertise, in order to obtain their personal benefits, which leads to the waste of R & D funds. Therefore, this paper argues that it is necessary for companies that implement equity incentive to reduce the shareholding ratio of management accordingly, and protect the interests of investors and banks. At the same time, in order to improve the efficiency of R&D investment, it is necessary to strengthen the supervision of innovation process and introduce other more supervision mechanisms, such as institutional investors or independent directors. In addition, as equity incentive plays a certain role in promoting innovation performance and easing financing constraints of non-state-owned holding listed companies, it is necessary for state-owned enterprises to increase the intensity of equity incentive and reduce the threshold of equity incentive. Although we made exhaustive robustness testing, but our research may also have the following shortcomings. Firstly, the financing constraints at the corporate level can be divided into internal financing constraints and external financing constraints. This paper mainly studies from the perspective of external financing constraints. Secondly, the innovation performance indicators such as the number of patents may not reflect the innovation quality of the company, which may reduce the representativeness of the research conclusions.