委托理财导致上市公司脱实向虚吗?——基于企业创新的视角

Does Entrusted Investment Distract Listed Firms from Their Intended Purpose? From the Perspective of Corporate Innovation

依据2008-2017年上市公司委托理财与专利数据,本文实证研究了委托理财对企业创新的影响。研究发现随着委托理财规模与理财收益对公司业绩贡献的增加,上市公司总体上创新数量变化不明显,但创新质量却显著下降。对于不同的委托理财而言,上市公司购买银行与非银行委托理财对创新质量的影响均为负面,但对创新数量的影响却正好相反。两种类型委托理财对创新数量的影响可能相互抵消,从而导致总体上委托理财对创新数量的影响不显著。进一步研究发现,购买更多的委托理财导致上市公司更加倾向于进行风险低的开发性创新,减少风险高的探索性创新。购买银行理财的上市公司更倾向于机会主义创新,而购买非银行理财的上市公司更可能消极创新。总之,基于企业创新视角的分析发现大规模和投机性的委托理财会干扰上市公司创新行为,导致其经营"脱实向虚"。

The scale of entrusted investment among China’s listed firms has grown rapidly over the past decade, adding up to trillions of RMB. However, many listed firms use money raised by initial public offerings, seasoned equity offerings, and issued bonds to buy entrusted investments, provoking fierce criticism from the media and heavy attention from supervisory agencies. As a result, the China Securities Regulatory Commission has intensified disclosure regulations on entrusted investments by modifying policies, disciplining listed firms to focus on their core business, and thus effectively stopping them being distracted from their intended purpose. Nonetheless, most firms claim in their announcements that the purpose of buying entrusted investments is to increase the efficient use of idle funds. In this case, what is China’s listed firms’ real purpose in buying such a huge amount of entrusted investments? Is it simply good financial management, or a sign that firms are distracted from their intended purpose? Unfortunately, these questions have been underexplored. This paper addresses these questions from the perspective of corporate innovation, and develops an agency problem hypothesis and financial management hypothesis to explain whether and how buying entrusted investments affects corporate innovation. Using detailed data on entrusted investments and patents from 2008 to 2017, this paper empirically tests two hypotheses. The main findings are threefold. First, innovation quality decreases significantly as the amount of entrusted investment and the contribution of its returns to income increase, while innovation quantity does not. Second, the impacts of entrusted investments from commercial banks and non-banks on innovation quality are both negative, while their impacts on innovation quantity are opposites. These conflicting impacts may offset each other, explaining the insignificant effect overall. Lastly, listed firms prefer to engage in exploitative innovation rather than exploratory innovation as entrusted investments increase. In particular, innovations of firms that buy more entrusted investments from banks are more opportunistic, while innovations of firms that buy more from non-banks are more passive. This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, although the extant literature has focused on the characteristics, motivations, risks, and agency problems of listed firms’ entrusted investment in China since roughly 2000(Chen and Ding, 2002, He and Wang, 2005), few studies have explored the determinants of recent entrusted investment and its impact on earnings volatility(Sun et al., 2016;Hu et al.,2019). Thus this paper extends the literature by analyzing entrusted investment’s impact on corporate innovation. Second, the literature has found that listed firms’ financialization through investing in bonds, equities, derivatives, real estate, and entrusted loans can affect innovation input and output(Yu and Li, 2016;Du et al., 2017;Liu, 2017), yet it ignores the important impact of financialization through other entrusted investments that are recorded in the accounts of other current assets. This paper fills this gap by investigating the impact of buying entrusted investments from commercial banks and trust companies, enriching the literature on the economic effect of listed firms’ financialization. Lastly, due to the unavailability of detailed data on patents in China, most of the existing literature has studied corporate innovation in terms of R&D expenditures and number of patents(Wen and Feng, 2012;Feng et al., 2017;Zhang et al.,2019) rather than innovation quality and strategy(Li and Zheng, 2016;Hao et al., 2018). This paper examines the impacts of entrusted investment on innovation quality and on exploratory versus exploitative innovation, enriching the literature on innovation strategy. This paper’s findings will be helpful for supervisory agencies aiming to improve entrusted investment regulations.Many firms successfully raise money and then buy entrusted investments rather than invest in the planned projects. Such financing is vulnerable to expropriation, and it suggests that listed firms lack an effective investment plan. In contrast, many small and mid-sized firms that are prospective find it difficult to raise money to facilitate innovation. As a result, attempts to regulate entrusted investment should also consider how the capital market can effectively facilitate corporate innovation.