行权业绩考核与企业研发投资:“治理”还是“压力”?——来自中国上市高科技企业的经验证据

Vesting Performance Requirements and Corporate R&D Investment:Governance or Pressure?Empirical Evidence from Listed High-tech Enterprises in China

业绩考核是有效激励的前提,可通过利益协同机制促进企业的长远发展(公司治理假说),也会因加剧业绩压力而诱发企业的短视行为(业绩压力假说)。基于我国股权激励特殊的业绩考核制度,本文检验了行权业绩考核对上市高科技企业研发投资的影响及机制。结果发现:行权业绩考核降低了高科技企业的研发投资,总体上支持了"业绩压力假说";异质性检验显示,该抑制效应在行权时间限制较短、管理层平均年龄较小、企业前期业绩表现较差和分析师关注程度较高的样本中更加明显,证实了业绩压力是行权业绩考核影响企业研发投资的内在机制。基于创新产出的进一步研究发现,行权业绩考核虽然提高了企业的专利申请数量,但主要体现在实用新型和外观设计等利用式创新上,对发明专利这一探索式创新反而产生了显著的挤出效应。本文拓展了行权业绩考核经济后果及企业研发投资影响因素的研究,为高科技企业科学地设置业绩考核目标提供了参考。

Performance evaluation provisions are the premise of corporate incentive schemes,which not only determines management focus and strategic direction of organization,but also shapes risk attitude and behavioral pattern of employees.As the key component of modern corporate compensation system,equity incentive plans(EIPs)have been rapidly used among Chinese listed companies.However,unlike time-vested EIPs of European and American enterprise that can be vested naturally upon the passage of time,Chinese EIPs are performance-vested equity awards which only pay out if the firm meets or exceeds the pre-set performance targets.That is,EIPs of Chinese listed companies are all or nothing awards which trigger vesting and determine payout of stock or option grants to executives upon the achievement of specific performance goals.R&D is important strategic investment which has a significant impact for enterprises to establish competitive advantages and ensure long-term development.Especially for high-tech enterprises,R&D investment is the fundamental driving force of their future performance growth.How to set up effective performance-vested provisions in EIPs to cultivate corporate innovation has always been an important research topic and a realistic problem concerned by high-tech enterprise managers and policymakers.However,a large number of studies have been carried out to explore the economic consequences of vesting performance requirements(VPRs),research results still remain inconsistent.Specifically,literature based on corporate governance hypothesis holds that VPRs can promote corporate long-term development through the mechanism of interest alignment.Conversely,researchers based on performance pressure hypothesis maintain that VPRs may induce the corporate short-sighted behavior by intensifying the performance pressure on employees.Based on the special vesting restriction characteristics of Chinese EIPs,this paper empirically examines whether VPRs play a“governance”role or a“pressure”role in R&D investment of listed high-tech enterprises.The empirical results show that:VPRs significantly reduce the corporate R&D investment,indicating that the performance pressure hypothesis dominates in Chinese listed high-tech companies.The inhibiting effect of VPRs on R&D investment is more obvious in the subsamples with shorter vesting horizon,younger managers,poorer early performance and higher analyst coverage,which confirms that performance pressure is the important internal influencing mechanism between vesting performance hurdles and corporate R&D investment.A further examination based on the effect of VPRs on innovation output indicates that VPRs increase the total number of high-tech enterprises’patent applications.However,the promotion in innovation output is mainly observed in utilization innovation such as utility model and appearance design.Whereas,VPRs exerts a significant crowding out effect on the exploratory innovation like invention patent.Compared with existing studies,this paper contributes to the literature and practice in the following three aspects:Firstly,we find the dominant role of VPRs in corporate R&D investment is“pressure”instead of“governance”,which expands the research on the economic consequences of VPRs and the influencing factors of corporate R&D investment.Secondly,heterogeneity tests show that performance pressure is the potential channel for VPRs in impeding R&D,which is helpful to clarify the underlying channels behind the effect of VPRs.Thirdly,this paper provides important practical implications to both regulators and companies.For regulators,our study offers directions about formulating the regulatory policies on VPRs.For listed high-tech enterprises,our study provides practical references to set innovatively promotional vesting performance targets.