规制性壁垒、异质不确定性与企业过度投资

Regulatory Barriers to Entry,Heterogeneous Uncertainty and Over-investment

产业组织理论与博弈论研究表明,在存在策略性进入壁垒或市场性进入壁垒条件下,不确定性上升可能促使企业过度投资。在当前多重风险叠加、企业面临不确定性加强的背景下,本文重点考察存在规制性壁垒条件下,异质不确定性可能影响企业过度投资的内在机理。通过构建企业与政府的两阶段动态期权博弈模型,并以2002-2016年房地产上市企业为样本,本文从理论与实证两方面考察了受规制性壁垒约束时异质不确定性对企业投资决策的影响。研究结果表明:(1)存在规制性壁垒条件下,企业的过度投资与先行期权的战略价值密不可分;(2)市场不确定性和政策时机不确定性均可能导致企业的过度投资,政策强度不确定性则会抑制企业的过度投资;(3)在规制性壁垒较严重的地区与行业,政策时机不确定性对企业过度投资的刺激作用更加显著;(4)供给侧改革,尤其是结构性的供给侧改革措施,对企业过度投资具有显著的抑制作用。

Over-investment has become one of the principal problems in China nowadays.While the traditional industrial organization and option game theories have studied the reasons why over-investment may exist in the long run from the perspectives of market barriers and strategic barriers to entry,they still fail to explain the existence of Chinese-style over-investment in monopolistic industries with weak competition.In China,firms may be subject to strict licensing and regulating of local governments,which increases regulatory barriers to entry for firms.To reduce the regulatory barriers,Chinese firms have the incentives to invest more in productive capacity to cater the short-term performance needs of local governments.Therefore,high regulatory barriers to entry may be able to explain Chinese-style over-investment.The prior studies have demonstrated the importance of uncertainty,especially policy uncertainties,in firms’investment decisions making.In 2018,the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China once again stressed that with a commitment of pursuing progress while maintaining economic stability,macro regulation policy must be precisely designed and implemented.This paper first provided a detailed discussion about various theoretical definitions and empirical measurements of policy uncertainty,and then explored the intrinsic mechanisms through which over-investment will be triggered by heterogeneous policy uncertainties when there are high regulatory barriers to entry.Based on the latest development of real options and option game theories,this paper examined the strategical investment decision when firms are confronted with the two heterogeneous uncertainties,namely,market uncertainty and policy uncertainty.We proposed that the strategic predominant value with regulatory barriers to entry may help to explain the Chinese-style over-investment.More specifically,this paper investigated the mechanism through which heterogeneous uncertainties,especially the heterogeneous policy uncertainty,may affect over-investment and the role of strategic predominant value.We also tested the restraining effect of supply-side reforms on firms’over-investment.Our research results are as follows.(1)Regulatory barriers to entry induce a positive relationship between strategic predominant value and over-investment.(2)Market uncertainty and policy timing uncertainty both increase the strategic predominant value of investment in productive capacity and then stimulate firms’over-investment,but policy intensity uncertainty mitigates over-investment problem by increasing the irreversible cost of investment in productive capacity.(3)The stimulating effect of policy timing uncertainty on firms’over-investment will be more pronounced in industries and regions with higher regulatory barriers to entry.(4)Compared with demand-side policies,the supply-side reform has more power to reduce the over-investment problem.The security and credit policies play a more prominent role in curbing over-investment than land and tax policies.For the policy implications,this paper emphasizes that to curb over-investment,the government should enhance the stability and precision of policy designs and implementations.Hidden regulatory barriers and administrative monopolies should be further eliminated to motivate enterprises to be more engaged in innovation investment instead of investment in productive capacity.A multi-level supply reform system with higher quality should be established to intensify the restraining effect of supply-side policies,especially land or tax policies.The main contributions of this paper are as follows.(1)Based on the research method of real options,and by investigating the strategic predominant value induced by regulatory barriers to entry,our option game model focuses on the entry investment before output decision-making rather than the productive investment in output decision-making to help people better understand Chinese-style over-investment.(2)This paper introduces the game model,deeply explores the mechanism of market uncertainty and policy uncertainty(timing and intensity),explicitly examines the interaction between micro-investment decision and macroeconomic regulation,and provides theoretical foundation for striving to prevent and resolve major risks,as well as for reducing ineffective supply of goods and services to enhance effective investment in China.(3)By using the real estate industry as the sample,we test the restraining effect of the supply-side policy on over-investment empirically,which can enrich the literature about the supply-side reform.