二代介入与企业创新——来自中国家族上市公司的证据

Second Generation Involvement and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from China

本文以2003-2014年我国上市家族企业为样本,研究二代介入对我国家族企业创新活动的影响。研究发现,二代介入对家族企业的创新活动有显著的正向影响,并且这种影响在二代为海归背景、外部监督较差的家族企业中更为明显。本文的结论在使用不同的创新活动度量方式、不同的二代介入度量方式、控制了内生性因素后依然成立。进一步研究发现,二代介入的家族企业通过减少关联交易、提高会计信息质量等途径缓和了代理冲突,进而改善了创新活动。这表明二代介入能降低企业代理成本,且在一定程度上能代替外部监督机制。本文的研究结论对当下面临代际传承问题的家族企业如何保持其长期竞争力具有一定的启示意义。

Over the last 30 years, a new generation of entrepreneurs has created millions of private firms in China, and many of those entrepreneurs are now approaching retirement. The descendants of those entrepreneurs are starting to get involved in their family firms. Based on the manually collected sample of Chinese listed family firms from 2003 to 2014, this paper investigates the effect of second generation involvement on corporate innovation. We find that second generation involvement has a positive effect on corporate innovation, and this effect is economically and statis- tically significant. Further analysis shows that second generation involvement can lower the agency costs by improving accounting quality and decreasing related-party transactions, thus to improve corporate innovation. Also our study finds that the positive effect of second generation involvement on corporate innovation is more significant in firms with lower institutional ownership and in firms located in areas with lower level of investor protection, which indi- cates that second generation involvement plays a substitutive role for external governance mechanism. Our results are robust to var- ious measurements of corporate innovation as well as second gen- eration involvement. To relieve the endogeneity concerns, we apply difference-in-differences （DID） research design and Heckman two stage least square regression to support our results. Our research contributes to the corporate innovation literature as well as Chinese family firm succession literature. This study provides enlighten- ing advices to family firms confronted with succession problems on how to maintain competitiveness and how to achieve long term development. Our results are also consistent with the transfer cost hypothesis of specialized assets in family firms, which implies that when the specialized assets highly correlated with the first founding generations arc difficult to pass across generations, the successors tend to improve corporate innovation to build up new competitive advantages. The conclusion of our paper has certain policy implica- tions for Chinese family firms＇ successions.