外部审计能促进企业技术创新吗?——来自中国企业的经验证据

Can External Audit Promote Enterprises'Technological Innovation?——Empirical Evidence from Chinese Enterprises

外部审计可软化融资约束、缓解委托代理问题,进而正向影响企业技术创新。基于世界银行的调查数据,考察了外部审计对企业技术创新的作用方向、强度和中介效应。经验研究结果显示:(1)外部审计显著正向影响企业技术创新,给定条件下,有外部审计的企业比其他企业从事技术创新的概率增加13.2%;(2)融资约束和代理成本的中介效应均在统计水平上显著,且为部分中介效应;(3)在异质性的创新活动中,外部审计均有显著的促进作用。从中介机制看,外部审计通过软化融资约束促进企业开发产品或流程改善型的新技术、推出新的质量控制程序和增加产品新特色;通过降低代理成本促进企业开展提升生产柔性的创新活动。研究结果延展了外部审计对企业行为的影响分析,为强化外部审计监督机制以促进企业技术创新提供事实依据。

External audit can soften financial constraints,alleviate the principal-agent problem and then positively affect the technological innovation of enterprises.Based on the survey data of the World Bank,the paper explores the internal mechanism of the external audit to the enterprises'technological innovation.The empirical results show that:(1)The external audit has significantly facilitated enterprises'technological innovation.Under the given conditions,the probability that an enterprise with external audit is engaged in technological innovation is 13.2%higher than that of any other enterprises(2)The mediation effect of financial constraint and agency cost is significant at the statistical level,and both are partial mediating effects.(3)In heterogeneous technological innovation activities,external audit has a significant promoting effect on different types of innovation.From the perspective of intermediary mechanism,external audit promotes enterprises to develop new technology and equipment for product or process improvements,introduce new quality control procedures and add new features to existing products or services by softening financial constraints;while external audit promotes enterprises to improve production flexibility by reducing agency cost.The research results extend the analysis of the influence of external audit on enterprise behavior and provide practical foundation for strengthening external audit supervision mechanism to promote enterprises'technological innovation.