政策不确定性损害了中国经济的长期增长潜力吗?——来自企业创新行为的证据

Does Policy Uncertainty Undermine the Long-term Economic Growth of China? Evidence from Corporate Innovation Behavior

本文基于中国特有的不断改革变化的制度背景和政府对经济活动频繁干预的政策环境,利用2003-014年间的2476家上市公司样本,考察政策不确定性对企业创新行为的影响。研究发现,政策不确定性与企业的创新产出水平显著正相关,表明不确定的政策环境会激励企业尽早执行创新投资以获得未来的增长期权,从而促进了企业的创新活动。在考虑了潜在内生性问题和进行一系列稳健性检验后,该结论仍成立。进一步研究发现,当外部产品市场竞争越激烈、增长机会越多、创新难度越大时,政策不确定性对企业创新活动的正向促进作用越显著。本文还将政策不确定性指数分解为来自全球、国家和地方政府三个层面的政策不确定性,发现政策不确定性与企业创新之间的正向关系主要是由来自地方政府层面的政策不确定性驱动的。本文的研究为理解宏观经济政策环境对长期经济增长及社会福利的影响提供了新的视角。

Based on China s unique institutional background of continuous reform and the government's policy environment of frequent intervention in economic activities, this paper uses Chinese listed companies' data between 2003 and 2014 to examine the impact of policy uncertainty on corporate innovation. We show that policy uncertainty is significantly positive with the corporate innovation, indicating that an uncertain poli cy environment will encourage firms to implement innovative investments as early as possible to obtain future growth options, thus promote the corporate innovation. This result is robust to endogeneity and robustness tests. Further analysis reveals that the positive effect of policy uncertainty on innovation is more pronounced when the external product market is more competitive, when the growth opportunities are greater, or when the innovation is more difficult. Furthermore, we decompose the policy uncertainty index into three levels: global, national and local policy uncertainty, and find that the positive relationship between policy uncertain ty and corporate innovation is mainly driven by the local government level s policy uncertainty. This study pro vides a new perspective for understanding the impact of the macroeconomic policy environment on long term economic growth and social welfare.