关系网络嵌入、联合创业投资与企业创新效率

Social Network Embeddedness,Venture Capital Syndication and Enterprise Innovation Efficiency

在正式制度尚不健全的资本市场背景下,中国创业投资行业仍经历了数十年的高速发展,促进了大量实体经济创新,这背后的原因和机制是什么呢?本文从创业投资促进企业创新产出的作用机理出发,实证检验了关系网络作为非正式制度补充创业投资领域正式制度缺失的作用和机制。以2018年前接受联合投资的A股上市公司为样本,本文发现联合投资主体间由于过往合作经历、共同求学和工作经历建立起的关系网络充当了缓解代理冲突的非正式制度,有效补偿了正式制度缺失时可能产生的短视行为,进而促进了这类创业投资在刺激企业创新中发挥的作用。研究表明,过往合作经历和共同校友关系嵌入下的联合投资企业创新效率更高,表现为专利数量的提升。机制检验表明,关系网络嵌入在联合投资团队代理冲突较强、自身失败容忍度较低的情况下能对创新发挥更大的促进作用。基于企业绩效-CEO变更敏感度的分析显示,关系网络嵌入确实增加了联合投资团队的失败容忍度水平。进一步研究表明,在正式制度发展薄弱的背景下,在创业投资机构更追求财务收益的前提下,关系网络嵌入对联合投资企业创新的正向作用更为明显,且在创业投资关系网络下,企业整体呈现出更高的风险承担后果,表现为被投企业会计收益率的变动率和股票收益率的变动率更高。此外,本文还通过一系列稳健性检验排除了内生性问题,以及本文结果可能存在的其他解读。本文的结论表明创业投资关系网络作为非正式制度组织形式,可以在正式制度缺失的新兴市场中发挥补偿作用。

China’s venture capital industry has experienced rapid development in recent decades,even though multi-layer capital market has not been established.In the underdeveloped market environment,venture capitalists(VCs)in China have effectively supported a large number of innovation output of the real economy and created world’s largest emerging venture capital market.What is the reason behind?To answer this question,we start with looking beneath VCs’role in promoting enterprise innovation.Along with the potential to create huge profit,innovative projects are generally chartered with long periodicity,great uncertainty,and high failure rate.Compared with other financing channels,it coincides with the profit model and payment structure of VC funds,which have professional ability to provide intensive governance and value-add services to start-ups.Literature shows that enterprises obtaining syndicated VC investment should have better innovation performance under the integrated injection of resources and experience.Although the joint investment under this contractual relationship has produced a series of resource integration effects,new principal-agent conflicts may emerge in the syndication group,where lead VCs generally play an active monitoring role on behalf of other syndication members.As thus,information asymmetry among start-ups and various VC institutions calls for periodic evaluation on enterprises’performance,which largely breeds VCs’myopia.Such periodic evaluation will not only hinder stressed entrepreneurs from long-term innovation investment,but also constrain lead VC’s value-added incentive.Theoretically,VC myopia would be largely weakened in the mature VC market where reputation mechanism is established and transaction friction reduces.This poses a particular challenge to VCs on the emerging market.According to studies in the field of sociology,less developed formal institutions means that the market would seek informal institutions as an alternative.Specifically,relationship network has chance to alleviate agency conflict among different institutions through activating the trust mechanism and reducing the cost of communication.This will weaken VC institutions’myopia and amplify their integration during syndication investments.It might be the reason that explains the development myth of China’s VC industry.Therefore,we conjecture and test whether the VC syndication with social network embeddedness,namely,private relationship due to VCs’past cooperation experience,joint study and work experience,perform better on promoting enterprises’innovation.Based on the mechanism of VC promoting enterprises’innovation output,this paper empirically tests the function and mechanism of relationship network as an informal system to supplement the lack of formal system in the VC field.Taking the A-share listed enterprises that received joint VC investment before 2018 as samples,this paper finds that when private relationship exists among the syndication group,enterprises show significantly better innovation performance reflected by the increase of patents number.Specifically,the relationship network established by the joint investment entities due to past cooperation experience,joint study experience and work experience acts as an informal system to alleviate agency conflicts,effectively compensating for the short-sighted behavior that may occur when the formal system is absent,and then promoting the role of such VC in stimulating enterprise innovation.Further tests show that relationship network embeddedness plays a greater role in the following cases.(1)The agency conflict of VC syndication group is stronger,i.e.,the lead VC is less trusted because of limited professional experience;and 2)individual VC’s failure tolerance rate is relatively low.In order to provide direct evidence that relationship network embeddedness does increase the failure tolerance level of VC syndication group,we test and find that enterprises receiving VC investments with relationship embeddedness are less likely to change CEO when they experience bad performance.It suggests that relationship embeddedness may work as an implement to formal institution through alleviating agency conflicts and increasing risk tolerance among syndicated VCs.Consistently,we notice that in regions with weak formal system development,the positive effect of relationship embeddedness increases.And when the majority syndication members are return-oriented institutions,i.e.,independent VCs instead of corporate VCs,the positive effect of relationship embeddedness is more obvious.As a natural consequence of higher risk-taking,these enterprises also show higher volatility of accounting return and stock return.In addition,we conduct a series of robustness tests to eliminate the endogenous challenges and other possible interpretations of the results in this paper.In conclude,relationship embeddedness among VC syndication compensates the lack of formal institutions.It explains the development myth of China’s VC industry and broadens our understanding of the effect of informal institutions on capital market.