高管职业背景会影响企业研发披露吗?

Do executive professional backgrounds affect corporate R&D disclosure?

选用2008-2014年间沪深两市非金融行业的上市公司作为样本,本文研究了高管团队的职业背景对研发支出自愿性披露的影响。研究发现:有研发职业背景的高管团队更可能在年报中披露公司的研发支出。在控制了公司创新强度、高管团队的其他特征(年龄、学历、性别),采用高技术行业样本,利用董监高研发职业背景比例,进行倾向得分匹配等一系列稳健性检验后,上述结论依然成立。进一步区分高管类型发现,有研发职业背景的C E O、董事长和有学术研究背景的C E O对公司披露研发支出的可能性有显著正向影响,而C F O的职业背景对公司研发披露决策没有明显影响。本文将职业背景这一重要高管特征引入企业研发披露的研究领域,丰富了“高层梯队理论”的文献与研发活动会计信息披露的相关研究。

Using Chinese listed firms in the non-financial sectors from 2008 to 2014, this paper investigates how executive professional backgrounds affect corporate R&D disclosure. We find that a firm of which the top management team(TMT) has career experience in R&D function will be more likely to disclose R&D expenditure. After controlling for innovation intensity and other TMT characteristics(i.e. age, degree and gender) and using a sample of high-tech industries, the proportion of executives with R&D backgrounds as a measure of TMT R&D professional backgrounds as well as the propensity score matching(PSM) method, the result is still robust. Additional tests show that a firm whose CEO has R&D or academic background or chairman has R&D background will be more likely to disclose R&D expenditure, while CFO’s functional backgrounds have no significant impact on R&D disclosure. By introducing the TMT characteristics to the research of R&D disclosure, our research enriches the literature on upper echelons theory and the R&D information disclosure. The contributions of this paper include the following two aspects. First, unlike most hypotheses in financial and economic research assuming that individuals have no heterogeneous impact on firms’ choices and outputs, the findings of this paper indicate that the personal characteristics of executives can explain the differences in corporate disclosure choices. Previous studies have pointed out that executives have a significant impact on the core corporate operations and financial decisions, which is particularly true when it comes to high-profile strategic decisions such as mergers and acquisitions, while this impact is relatively small when it comes to financial decisions of daily operations, such as cash holdings. Expanding the scope of impact of executive heterogeneity on the firms’ decisions, our empirical evidence suggests that executives also have a significant impact on the seemingly minor decision of voluntary disclosure. Second, based on the fact that most listed companies in China do not disclose their R&D expenditures, this paper examines the impact of executive professional background on corporate R&D disclosure. Most studies have focused on the impact of executive characteristics on the quality of financial reporting, but the quality of financial information must be based on the premise that relevant information has been disclosed in the report. Currently, there is no uniform regulation on the R&D disclosure of listed companies in China. The management team has plenty of space to choose whether to disclose R&D expenditures as well as how to disclose them. The lack of R&D expenditure disclosure poses a challenge to the information acquisition and supervision of auditors and other information intermediaries. Therefore, it is a new perspective to test whether the functional background of executives affects corporate R&D disclosure.Moreover, it provides a reference for the accounting information disclosure of China’s further regulation of R&D activities. The findings of this paper offer an implication for management. That is, it is not a surprise for not voluntary disclosing R&D expenditure in the financial reports. The degree of information asymmetry between management and outside stakeholders depends on the characteristics of the executive professional background. Our results support the upper echelons theory, showing a critical factor of corporate R&D disclosure, which provides a new perspective for the study of executive characteristics and corporate information disclosure.