CEO贫困出身与企业创新:人穷志短抑或穷则思变?

CEOs Born Poor and Corporate Innovation: Whether Poverty Breeds or Stunts Your Ambition?

本文以2008—2014年民营上市企业为样本,从后天教育、政府支持和海外经历三个视角考察了CEO贫困出身对企业创新的影响。研究发现,在不同的后天经历影响下,先天贫困出身的CEO对企业创新的影响呈现显著差异,具体而言:(1)先天贫困出身的CEO如果后天接受了良好的教育,会显著促进企业创新,反之,则会显著抑制企业创新;(2)后天政府支持有助于贫困出身CEO获得更多创新资源优势,进而显著促进企业创新;(3)后天海外经历限制了贫困出身CEO对产品创新的投入,进一步研究发现,这是由于中国CEO海外经历的价值在于将有限的企业资源集中于拓展海外市场,而非通过丰富人力资本来促进企业创新。上述结论在考虑内生性影响后依然稳健。结论表明,贫困出身虽然影响了CEO个性塑造,但后天努力与人生际遇会改变先天贫困出身对CEO个性特征的作用,也说明当前的教育扶贫政策对贫困出身群体后天的个性塑造具有重要的积极作用。

Since the reform and opening in 1978,China's economic has achieved growth miracle for more than 30 years.However,the growing disparities in wealth and the decreasing social mobility indicate that social origin has determined a person's achievements and social status to a great extent.In this context,more and more people like to label the person who was born poor.Some people believe that“poverty stifles ambition”,that is,the poor always give too much attention to short term interests and ignore long term interests.In terms of enterprise economic theory,the manager who was born poor may ignore the investment for firm's long term interests,such as R&D.While others regard“poverty leads to change”,that is,people who have experienced poverty continue to innovate in order to avoid falling into poor once again.Therefore,exploring the effect of CEOs'social origin on corporate innovation is not only helpful for us to know more objectively about the influence of the social mobility on the firm,so as to eliminate the people's inherent concept of the person who was born poor,but also provide some policy implications on how to use innovation driven factors to promote sustainable grow of China's macro economy in the background of the“new normal”of the Chinese economy.Subject to the availability of social origin data,we collect CEO born poor data of Chinese private listed company by ensure whether the birthplace of CEO belonged to national poor counties,and whether CEO described himself as“born poor”in media coverage.We define the innovation input and output by the firm's R&D investment and patents respectively,and then take the innovation input or innovation output as the dependent variable,take CEO born poor as the main explanatory variable.Next,we conduct regression analysis on the perspective of overall angle and different life experiences,such as educational experiences,political connections,overseas experience and endogenous processing.The results show that,firstly,from overall angle of view,CEOs born in poor families have no significant impact on the R&D investment,the reason is that the effects are different for different educational experiences.Specifically,we find that firms with CEOs born in poor family and acquire good education significantly invest more in R&D,otherwise they significantly invest less in R&D.Secondly,firms with CEOs born in poor family and acquire political connection significantly invest more in R&D,that is because political connection helps firms to gain more resource advantages.Thirdly,firms with CEOs born in poor family and have international experience significantly invest less in R&D.Further analyses find that CEOs'purpose of going abroad is to exploit overseas markets rather than promoting corporate innovation by enriching human capital in China.The results are robust to no matter it is R&D input,R&D output or potentially endogenous problem.The findings indicate that,social origin indeed affect CEOs'characteristics,but more importantly,one's hard working and life experience may affect the influence from social origin on his characteristics.Our study contributes to the literature in several ways.Firstly,this paper extends the literature on the influence of management attributes on corporate business decision.Our study is distinguished from the previous literature which either focuses on the perspective of early experience,or later experience to examine the influence on corporate business decision.In particular,we first examine how CEOs'poor families affect corporate business decision by affecting their character,and then further examine whether the impact of the early experience on corporate business decision is vary from the later experience.Our study not only helps to make up the blank of previous literature,but also helps to expand the research on the combination of the discipline of management and sociology.Secondly,this paper extends the literature on the factors that affect R&D.We examine how the CEOs born in poor families affects R&D from perspectives of“poverty stifles ambition”and“poverty leads to change”,and helps us to understand the driving factors of R&D more deeply.Thirdly,the conclusion is not only helpful to reduce the inherent prejudice of the poor group,thus promoting the social mobility,but also provide empirical evidence for the educational poverty alleviation which is regarded as a cure for the targeted measures to help people lift themselves out of poverty in china.