突破式创新对分析师行为的影响——基于上市公司专利分类和引证数据的证据

Disruptive Innovation and Analyst Activities:An Empirical Study based on Patent Classifications and Citations

本文利用专利分类和引证数据,构造上市公司突破式创新的度量指标,研究公司突破性创新对分析师行为的影响。本文发现,突破式创新吸引了更多分析师关注,增加了分析师预测分歧水平,提高了分析师调研时询问与公司创新相关问题的概率和比例,但是不影响预测准确性。进一步研究发现,分析师和公司的地理距离远时,突破式创新会降低预测准确性,并提高预测分歧水平。本文为公司突破性创新对资本市场的影响提供经验证据,并拓展影响分析师行为因素的相关研究,对投资者、分析师和监管部门理解公司创新突破式程度,促进资本市场配置效率,助力于经济高质量发展有重要政策意义。

Based on detailed patent classification and citation data from the Website of the state intellectual property administration, this paper constructs measures of innovation strategy and investigates its influence on equity analysts’ behavior, including analyst following, analyst forecast accuracy, analyst forecast dispersion and analysts’ site visits.We find that, comparing with incremental innovation, disruptive innovation attracts more analyst.The result is consistent with supply-demand model of analyst following.From supply side, analysts have motivations to follow firms that conduct disruptive innovation instead of those conducting incremental innovation.On one hand, disruptive innovation is associated with complex information, which provides opportunities for analysts to signal their ability to investors and thus benefiting career development.On the other hand, in Chinese emerging market where disruptive innovation is advocated by government and essential for firms to stand out, analysts will follow this kind of firms to increase commission fees since they have potential in value creation.From demand side, disruptive innovation changes prior technological trajectories, which makes it hard for investors to find a comparable peer firm and decreases relevance of historical data.Also firms tend to decrease information disclosure to reduce technology spillover and the risk of being imitated by competitors at a low cost.Also, disruptive innovation increases investors’ confusion over complicated technology and unpredicted economic consequence.In this case, investors will face obstacles in collecting and interpreting information and thus increasing their demand for analysts’ professional forecasts to judge firm value.Even though following firms that conduct disruptive innovation brings analysts high cost of collecting and analyzing information, the decision to follow a firm depends on net utility(benefits of following a firm minus corresponding costs).China is in a stage when innovation quality is gradually more important than quantity.Disruptive innovation is expected to attract investors’ attention, which makes it likely that the net utility of following a firm is positive.Also, this paper finds that disruptive innovation increases forecast dispersion among analysts Forecast dispersion reflects the degree to which analyst’s forecasts differ from others.Disruptive innovation exerts an increased uncertainty in technology, market and return, which makes analysts’ forecasting models more divergent.Further analyses find that short distance between analysts and firm can release the positive influence of explorative innovation on analysts’ dispersion, supporting the idea that short distance provides analysts more overlapping information and make their analyzing model less divergent.Analysts do not have a consistent judgement toward firm value, which makes forecast dispersion larger.However, we do not find a significant relationship between disruptive innovation and forecast accuracy.In cross-sectional tests, we find that analysts’ forecast accuracy depends on the information they gain for estimating.The shorter is the distance between analysts and firms geographically, the more accurate are analysts’ forecasts.Local analysts are advantageous in gaining information of firms, while analysts who are located far away from firms have to devote more resource in collecting firm information.This paper also finds that disruptive innovation increases information demand, which further influences analysts’ site visits.By textual analysis, analysts are more likely to raise questions about firm innovation during site visits.In robust tests, heckman two stage model and instrumental variable method are used to mitigate potential endogeneity problem.Also, this paper changes measures of disruptive innovation and controls the influence of diversification to test robustness.Further, this paper tests whether analysts deliver information to capital markets.The result shows that analysts can reduce stock price synchronicity efficiently, showing that analysts can help investors understand complex information of disruptive innovation.This study not only enriches the literature of economic consequence of disruptive innovation on capital markets, but also supplements the study of analysts’ role in capital markets.The paper also provides important implications for investors, listed firms, and regulators to improve information disclosure of explorative innovation and then facilitate efficiency of resource allocation for high-quality economic development.