上市促进了企业创新吗?——来自创业板制造业企业的经验证据

Does going public affect corporate innovation?Evidence from China's manufacturing firms in the GEM

本研究利用手工收集的2009-2013年在创业板市场申请上市的制造业企业样本以及企业创新专利变量,经过对成功上市企业与终止上市企业的样本匹配,运用双重差分模型考察了上市是否促进我国创业板制造业企业创新,研究结果表明,上市显著促进了企业专利创新。进一步地,我们探讨了上市促进企业创新的机制,结果发现,上市通过改善融资约束显著促进了企业创新,而上市没能通过影响代理问题作用于企业创新。该结果意味着直接金融发展有助于推动企业创新;资本市场的风险分担及融资机制能够降低企业融资约束、进而促进企业创新。这不仅为直接金融促进企业创新提供了新的证据,也为我国进一步发展与完善资本市场,进而促进经济转型、创新发展提供了新的政策启示。

Corporate innovation can not only improve the competitiveness of firms,but also promote the innovative development of national economy. At present,China is trapped in the economic transformation that aimed to be out of the resources input-driven economy; innovation is expected to be the most principal and feasible countermeasures to walk out of such trap,from the microcosmic perspective,promoting corporate innovation will speed up the transformation of the Chinese economy into an innovation-driven development model. It is well known that capital market is a more effective mechanism in allocating resources,as it will deliver resources from lower to high-quality firms for better innovation. However,the Chinese capital market is often criticized as a ＂Casino ＂and a market for ＂encircling money ＂. Meanwhile,there are some well-innovative technology firms are not public firms. Therefore,it pops up a question： does going public promote corporate innovation in China？One strands of the existing literatures on firms＇ going public focused on the pricing efficiency of IPOs as well as the performance of listed firms; others explore the improvement of corporate governance from firms＇ listing. But fewpay attention to the effects of going public on corporate innovation,as well as the undeveloped countries. Chinese capital market is characterized with immature and dramatically fluctuating,therefore it is meaningful to study howgoing public to the capital market affect corporate innovation in China. Using hand-collected data of China manufacturing firms in the GEMfrom 2009 to 2013,the paper investigate whether going public affect corporate innovations. In doing so, we first matched the successfully listed firms and unsuccessfully listed firms（ being terminated with listing application）,then employing DID model,we examine whether going public promotes corporate innovation for manufacturing firms in the GEMof China. The results suggest that going public can significantly promote the corporate patent innovations. Further,we turn to explore the mechanisms or channels through which going public promotes corporate innovation, the findings indicate that going public can promote corporate innovation significantly by alleviating financial constraints,but does not have considerable influence on corporate innovation by affecting the agency problem of firms. This study is of great significance. In theory,it provides newevidences that financial development,especially, direct-finance development can promote corporate innovation. This provides a newangle of understanding the decision of firms to go public,which is also helpful to explain why firms choose to go public. In addition,it also verified the mechanisms through which going public promotes corporate innovation. The existing these studies do not directly explore howgoing public affects corporate innovation by alleviating financial constraints and agency problem. Such will deepen our understanding about the channels through which capital market exerts an effect on corporate innovation. In Practice,it shed lights on our innovation-driven policies; first,deepening and widening our capital market could be an important way to speed up Chinese economic transformation and innovation-driven development. Second, strengthening and improving the financing mechanisms of Chinese capital market is also important for corporate innovation as well as the economic innovation and transformation in China.