本地锦标赛激励与企业创新产出

Local Tournament Incentives and Firm Innovation Output

高管不仅会参与行业劳动力市场的行业锦标赛竞争,还会参与本地区劳动力市场的锦标赛竞争,有关外部锦标赛激励与企业创新关系的文献均关注行业锦标赛激励,鲜有文献研究本地锦标赛激励对企业创新的影响。本文以2006-2015年中国上市公司为样本,使用CEO与本地区最高薪酬CEO间的本地薪酬差距衡量本地锦标赛激励,并以发明专利申请数量衡量企业创新产出,考察了本地锦标赛激励与企业创新产出的关系。研究发现,本地锦标赛激励提升了企业创新产出,且当CEO参与本地锦标赛竞争意愿较强时,本地锦标赛激励对企业创新产出的提升作用更大。研究还发现,本地锦标赛激励会通过提高企业创新投入和降低董事会监督强度的途径提升企业创新产出,还会通过降低财务报告质量和提高债务融资成本的途径降低企业创新产出。本文首次研究了本地锦标赛激励与企业创新的关系,同时也为中国上市公司建立高效的创新激励机制提供了参考。

Innovation is not only an important engine for a country's sustained economic growth,but also the key for enterprises to maintain long-term competitive advantage.The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that China should"accelerate the construction of an innovative country".The construction of an innovative country needs the support of enterprise technological innovation.Therefore,the establishment of an efficient innovation incentive mechanism by enterprises is the key to China's construction of an innovative country.Building an innovative country needs the support of enterprise technological innovation.Therefore,the key for China to build an innovative country is to establish an efficient innovation incentive mechanism.Enterprise innovation activities have obvious characteristics of high risk and long-term,and are more vulnerable to market frictions such as moral hazard,executive myopia and information asymmetry.Therefore,it is very important to study how executive incentive mechanism promotes enterprise innovation.External tournament incentives are important executive incentive mechanism,and rel-evant studies pay more attention to industry tournament incentives.Executives will not only participate in the industry tournament competition in the industry labor market,but also participate in the local tournament competition in the local labor market.However,there is little literature on how the local tournament incentives of the local labor market to executives affects enterprise innovation.Using the sample of Chinese listed firms over the period 2006-2015,we investigate the relationship between local tournament incen-tives and corporate innovation output.Specially,we measure local tournament incentives as the gap between CEO compensation at the firm of interest and maximal CEO compensation among firms in the same area,and meaure corporate innovation output as the number of application patents,and find that local tournament incentives are positively related to corporate innovation output,which shows that local tournament incentives promote firm innovation.We also find that when the CEO's willingness to participate in local tournament competition is stronger,the local tournament incentives have a stronger role in promoting enterprise innovation.Finally,we find that the mechanism of local tournament incentives to promote firm innovation is that local tournament incentives improve firm innovation investment and reduce the intensity of board supervision,and that the mechanism of local tournament incentives to hinder enterprise innovation is that local tournament incentives reduce the quality of financial reporting and improve the cost of debt financing.The theoretical contributions of this paper mainly include the following four aspects:First,relevant studies pay more attention to the relationship between internal tournament incentives,industry tournament incentives and enterprise innovation.There is little liter-ature on how local tournament incentives affect enterprise innovation.Therefore,this paper expands the research on the impact of tournament incentives on enterprise innovation.Second,this paper finds that when the CEO has a strong willingness to participate in the local tournament competition,the positive correlation between local pay difference and enterprise innovation output is more significant,which confirms that the local pay gap will have a tournament incentives effect on the CEO.Therefore,this paper provides empirical evidence for the pay gap to produce tournament incentives for senior executives.Thirdly,this paper analyzes and verifies the mechanism of local tournament incentives on enterprise innovation,and finds that local tournament incentives will affect enter-prise innovation output by improving innovation investment,reducing the supervision intensity of the board of directors,reducing the quality of financial reports and improving the cost of debt financing,which provides empirical evidence for the mechanism of tourna-ment incentives on enterprise innovation.Fourthly,by investigating the relationship between local tournament incentives and enter-prise innovation output,this paper provides new empirical evidence for the economic consequences of local tournament incentives,and enriches the research on local tournament incentives.The research of this paper reveals the internal logic of the promotion incentives of local labor market affecting enterprise innovation,helps enterprises to establish and improve the executive incentive mechanism to promote firm innovation,and also provides policy support for the government to accelerate the development and improve the executive labor market from the perspective of promoting enterprise innovation.