股权激励会强化管理层的迎合动机吗?——来自上市公司R&D投资的证据

Does Equity Incentive Reinforce Managerial Catering Motivation? Evidence from R&D Investments of Chinese Public Companies

股权激励强化了管理层利益与股票价格之间的关联,可能导致管理层利用R&D投资迎合股票错误定价,以实现其自身利益最大化。以上市公司R&D投资为研究视角,本文检验了股权激励计划的实施对我国上市公司管理层迎合动机的影响。首先,在控制了股权融资渠道的影响后,股票错误定价仍然会推动上市公司R&D投资,表明上市公司存在R&D迎合投资。其次,股权激励计划的实施强化了上市公司R&D迎合投资。最后,分组检验的结果显示,股权激励计划对R&D迎合投资的影响在非国有上市公司、高科技上市公司中以及股价被高估时表现更为显著。本文的研究结果表明,股权激励计划的实施强化了管理层的迎合动机,从一个独特的视角为解释管理层股权激励影响公司行为提供了新的证据。

In an inefficient capital market,irrational sentiments of investors can make stock prices deviate from intrinsic values of firms and henceforth induce stock mispricing,which will affect corporate behaviors such as finan-cing and investment actually by equity financing channel and rational catering channel.But seasoned equity offer-ings(SEOs)of Chinese public companies are usually regulated by the government strictly,so managers are not able to implement SEOs independently.As a result,equity financing channel can?t work well and stock mispricing main-ly influences corporate behaviors by rational catering channel.As an important part of corporate investments,R&D investment is often used as one of catering methods by managers because of its large size and uncertain payoff in the future.Obviously,managerial catering motivation is closely related to manager?s wealth and in turn will be affected by agency problems and corporate governance.Equity incentive is usually regarded as an effective mechanism to solve managerial agency problem and has been widely used by Chinese public companies since the end of2005.On the one hand equity incentive changes the structure of managerial compensation and therefore increases the sensitivity of manager?s interests to stock price,on the other hand equity incentive can induce manager to maintain stock prices,which will prevent manager from being dismissed.Besides exploring the effects of equity incentive on corporate fi-nancial policies directly,it is important to investigate whether equity incentive will induce managers to cater stock mispricing by taking advantage of R&D investment.Based on a hand-collected database,this paper studies the effects of equity incentive schemes on R&D catering investments of Chinese public companies.First,this paper explores the existence of R&D catering investments by following Polk and Sapienza(2009)?s method.This study finds that stock mispricing has a significantly positive in-fluence on corporate R&D investments after controlling the effect of equity financing channel or deleting the SEOs sample,which means that firms have strong R&D investment-mispricing sensitivities.Second,this study uses two quantitative and qualitative proxies to measure equity incentive schemes of Chinese public companies,and then in-vestigates whether equity incentive will influence R&D investment-mispricing sensitivities.The empirical results show that the implementation of equity incentive schemes significantly increases corporate R&D investment-mispric-ing sensitivities,which suggests that equity incentive should reinforce managerial catering motivation and induce managers to increase R&D investments for catering stock mispricing.Finally,this study further explores the hetero-geneous influences of equity incentive across different groups.Without loss of generality,this paper divides the sam-ple into several subsamples in accordance to some different standards such as ownership nature,industry category and market situation.The raw results show that the effects of equity incentive on R&D investment-mispricing sensi-tivities are greater among non-state-owned or overvalued firms.After controlling endogeneity,equity incentives of high-technology firms have a stronger influence on R&D investment-mispricing sensitivity than ones of normal firms.This suggests that equity incentives would have some unbalanced influences on R&D investment-mispricing sensitiv-ities.In conclusion,because there are some interest conflicts between managers and shareholders in the real world,managers will be motivated to take advantage of corporate policies and therefore to cater stock mispricing for the sake of their own benefits.This mechanism is quite different from the one in the framework of agency theory,which describes how equity incentives affect corporate policies directly by changing corporate agency costs.Especially,these results will facilitate us to understand the relationship between equity incentive and managerial motivation and behavior from another unique perspective.Based on the evidences of this paper,it is important for us to not only un-derstand the mechanism by which stock market can allocate resources and support real economy,but also design eq-uity incentive schemes well to affect the managerial catering motivation which will affect the growth of corporate val-ue.