董事高管责任保险与企业绿色创新:激励工具还是自利手段

Directors'and Officers'Liability Insurance and Enterprise Green Innovation:Incentive Tools or Self-interested Means?

以2011—2019年我国A股上市公司为研究对象,通过手动收集企业董事高管责任保险及绿色专利数据,实证考察董事高管责任保险对绿色创新的影响,结果发现:①董事高管责任保险能够显著促进企业绿色创新,即董事高管责任保险是企业绿色创新的激励工具,而非管理层阻碍绿色创新的自利手段;②通过Heckman两阶段模型、倾向得分匹配缓解可能存在的内生性问题,并经过一系列其它稳健性检验后,基本结论仍保持不变;③董事高管责任保险对绿色创新的促进作用在不同规模、不同股权集中度的企业间存在差异,主要表现为对中小型企业的影响大于大型企业,对股权较为集中企业的影响大于股权分散企业。从董事高管责任保险这一全新视角对企业绿色创新进行解读,可为加速我国上市企业董事高管责任保险知识普及,驱动企业绿色创新跨越式发展提供理论支撑。

China's rapid economic development has led to rapid deterioration of the ecological environment.As the main culprit of regional environmental pollution,enterprises have an indispensable responsibility to balance the relationship between economic benefits and environment.It is the inevitable choice to build a green,intensive and efficient innovation system and promote green innovation for sustainable development of enterprises.However,compared with ordinary innovation activities,green innovation is a continuous task with higher risk coefficient,higher possibility of failure and longer return cycle,which may lead to the lack of confidence and incentive for managers to carry out green innovation projects.More realistically,managers can face lower salaries or even career losses if an innovation fails,making them keen to pursue short-term projects with fewer risks and faster returns.Therefore,it is crucial to the survival and development of enterprises to find out how to effectively restrain the short-sighted behavior of enterprise management,improve the tolerance of management to the uncertainty of innovation activities,and encourage management to continue green innovation activities.As a new sustainable development model,enterprise green innovation has been widely concerned by researchers and practitioners.Seeking"harmonious coexistence"with the environment has become a global issue.Existing researches actively explore the influencing factors of enterprise green innovation,mainly including market pressure and orientation,environmental regulations,government subsidies,distance of environmental protection,knowledge transfer and green knowledge sharing.However,few studies have focused on the impact of D&O liability insurance on green innovation from the perspective of insurance incentives.Nowadays,the popularity of D&O liability insurance has brought unprecedented impact on the traditional agency relationship and governance model of enterprises.As D&O insurance is a contract to reduce the liability risk of corporate executives in the process of corporate governance,can its purchase stimulate the willingness of enterprises to green innovation and promote their green innovation activities?This is the problem that needs to be explored in this paper.To further answer the above questions,this paper takes Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in China from 2011 to 2019 as the research object.The selected enterprises involve 17 categories of the industry classification guidelines for listed companies revised by the CSRC in 2012,and this paper matches the directors'liability insurance data with the enterprise green patent data to form the 2011-2019 panel data set to empirically examines the impact of D&O liability insurance on green innovation.The results show that firstly D&O liability insurance can significantly promote green innovation,that is,D&O liability insurance is an incentive tool for green innovation,but not a selfish means for management to hinder green innovation.Secondly the possible endogeneity problems are alleviated by the Heckman two-stage model and propensity score matching,and the basic results remain unchanged after a series of other robustness tests.Thirdly the promotion effect of D&O liability insurance on green innovation is different among enterprises of different sizes and ownership concentration,mainly showing that the impact of D&O liability insurance on small and medium-sized enterprises is greater than that of large enterprises,and the impact of D&O liability insurance on enterprises with more concentrated ownership is greater than that of enterprises with dispersed ownership.This paper interprets the green innovation of enterprises from the unique perspective of D&O liability insurance,which has certain theoretical and practical significance for the existing research and enterprise practice.First of all,this paper is the first to study the impact of D&O liability insurance on enterprise green innovation,enriching principal-agent theory and management incentive theory.Secondly,this study provides theoretical support for accelerating the popularization of D&O liability insurance knowledge and driving the leapfrog development of green innovation of enterprises in China.