融资约束对企业广告和研发策略的影响:理论与经验证据

How Do Financial Constraints Affect the Corporate Portfolio of Advertising and R&D Activities?Theory and Empirical Evidence

广告有助于扩大产品的市场份额,研发则可以提高产品的利润加成,故两项活动都是企业提升绩效的主要途径。尽管既有文献分别考察了融资约束对企业广告和研发活动的抑制作用,但一个不足之处是忽视了广告和研发之间的互补性及其影响。本文通过一个简单的理论模型表明,给定企业可以同时选择广告和研发,且两者具有功能互补性,则融资约束的小幅变化可能会导致企业在广告和研发策略组合上的“跳跃性”变化,故单独考虑广告或研发将有可能低估融资约束的负面影响。基于中国工业企业数据库(2005-2007年)数据和多项式选择模型的经验检验支持理论分析的主要结论。

Advertising and R&D activities are two fundamental ways for a firm to improve its economic performance by expanding market share and increasing profit margin respectively.Although existing literature has already documented negative effect of financial constraints on either advertising or R&D,it neglects the crucial role of advertising-R&D complementarity and the resulting impacts.We first develop a simple model in which advertising and R&D are complementary and hence a slight change of corporate financial constraints may induce a jump of their advertising-R&D portfolio choice,implying that considering either advertising or R&D alone will underestimate the negative effect of financial constraints.These theoretical results are supported by our empirical study based on Annual Survey of Industrial Firms Database(2005-2007)and multinomial logit model.