财政层级改革与企业创新——基于“省直管县”改革的准自然实验

Fiscal Hierarchy Reform and Corporate Innovation:A Quasi-natural Experiment Based on the“Province-managing-county”Fiscal Reform

如何通过政府制度变革重塑地方政府行为激励,促进创新与经济高质量发展,是一个值得深入研究的问题。笔者利用1998—2013年中国工业企业数据与专利数据,以"省直管县"改革为准自然实验,运用多期双重差分方法,考察财政层级改革对企业创新的影响。研究发现,"省直管县"改革抑制企业创新。工具变量法与其他一系列稳健性检验均支持上述结论。机制检验发现,这一创新抑制效应的影响机制在于改革产生的征税激励与资源误置,即改革激励县级政府提高征税努力,加重企业实际税负和融资约束,同时强化其"重生产,轻服务"的支出结构偏好,加剧地区资源配置扭曲。本文研究丰富了财政层级改革及其经济影响的文献,对优化政府间纵向财政关系改革、深入推进创新驱动发展战略具有一定借鉴意义。

How to reshape local government behavior incentives through government system reforms and promote innovation and high-quality economic development is a question worthy of in-depth study.We apply a staggered DID method using Chinese industrial enterprise data and patent data over the period of 19982013 to examine the impact of fiscal hierarchy reform on corporate innovation.We find that PMC reform inhibits corporate innovation.The instrumental variable method and a series of other robustness tests support the above conclusion.The mechanism test shows that this innovation inhibition effect mainly comes from the tax incentives and resource misplacement generated by the reform.The reform encourages county-level governments to increase tax efforts,thereby aggravating enterprises actual tax burden and financial constraints;meanwhile,the reform strengthens the local governments preference for the expenditure structure of“emphasizing production and neglecting services”and exacerbates resource misallocation.This paper enriches the literature on fiscal hierarchy reform and its economic impact,and is instructive for optimizing vertical fiscal relationship reform and deepening the innovation-driven development strategy.