信任官媒可以促使企业家投资吗?——来自全国私营企业调查的证据

Can trust in the official medias promote enterprise investment in China——Evidence from Chinese private enterprise survey

本文利用"中国私营企业调查"数据考察了企业主对官方媒体的信任与企业投资决策的关系。研究发现:(1)信任官方媒体可以扩大企业的整体投资,但主要是对长期导向投资有促进作用。这一结论在处理了内生性问题和稳健性检验后仍然成立;(2)从影响机制来看,信任官方媒体可以降低企业家对环境风险的感知并提高对自身地位的感知,从而为制定积极的投资决策创造心理条件。本研究表明强化民营企业家对官方媒体的信任是激励企业投资的有效路径。因此,应进一步加强官方媒体传递政策信息的作用,缓解非市场因素导致的信息不对称问题,为扩大民营企业投资创造有利的信息环境。

Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the central government and local governments have issued a large number of favorable policies such as optimizing the business environment,relaxing restrictions on industry access,and expanding finance,which aims at stimulating private investment.In the process of reform and development of China’s market economy,various forms of information asymmetry problems have emerged one after another due to problems such as imperfect market mechanism construction.Moreover,the distribution of information within private enterprises is also unequal.A few large private enterprises can directly obtain rare valuable resources through political connections,nevertheless,the small and medium-sized enterprises can only rely on the indirect method from the official media to interpret policy information and seek business opportunities.Therefore,examining the relationship between private entrepreneurs’subjective attitudes towards official media and investment decisions has an important practical value for promoting sustainable development of private enterprises and maintaining stable operation of the macro economy.The research questions of this article are as follows:First,since the strategic decisions of private enterprises need to be closely integrated with national policies,can trust in the official media that convey policy information expand corporate investment?Second,does the incentive effect of trust in the official media exist in both long-term and short-term investment decisions?Third,what is the mechanism that exist in the relationship of trust in the official media and corporate’s investment?This article uses data from the 11 th Chinese Private Enterprise Survey conducted in 2014 and applied the Tobit model to examine the relationship between business owners’trust in official media and corporate’s investment decisions.The study founds that:(1)Trusting the official media can expand the overall investment of private enterprises,but it mainly promotes long-term investment.This conclusion is still valid after dealing with endogenous issues and doing robustness tests;(2)From the perspective of the mechanism,trusting the official media can not only reduce entrepreneurs’perception of environmental risks but also improve their perception of their own social-economic status,so as to make good psychological conditions for expanding the investment decisions.In other words,the more private entrepreneurs’s trust in the information conveyed by the official media,the more they can significantly improve their expectations of the future situation and the evaluation of their own status,which can enhance the enthusiasm for investment.This research shows that strengthening the trust of private entrepreneurs in the official media is an effective way to stimulate erterprise investment.Therefore,the role of the official media in disseminating policy information should be further strengthened,and the information asymmetry problem caused by non-market factors should be alleviated.Besides,the favorable information environment should be created for the expansion of the investment of private enterprises.The theoretical contributions of this research are reflected in the following points:First,this paper supplements the explanation of the factors affecting the investment decision-making of private enterprises from the unique perspective of media trust.This article analyzes how private entrepreneurs’trust in official media affects enterprise investment,which will help deepen the understanding of the logic of the investment decision-making.Second,this paper expands the empirical research based on the basic view of attention.Existing research on entrepreneurs mainly explores the relationship between entrepreneurs’attention to commercial media and behavioral decision-making.This article emphasizes the influence of official media on decision-making of private enterprises,and provides corresponding empirical evidence.