企业经济政策不确定性感知的传染效应:基于年报文本挖掘和连锁董事网络的分析

The Contagion of Firm’s Perception of Economic Policy Uncertainty:Based on the Textual Analysis of Annual Reports and Interlocking Board Networks

企业经济政策不确定性感知的传染效应是研究经济政策不确定性问题的崭新视角.本文使用文本挖掘方法,从2008–2018年沪深A股上市公司年报中提取信息,测算企业经济政策不确定性感知指标.本文进一步将企业经济政策不确定性感知置于连锁董事网络框架之下,分析了企业经济政策不确定性感知的传染效应及其经济后果.本文研究发现,企业经济政策不确定性感知会通过嵌入的连锁董事网络产生传染效应.异质性研究表明,对于存在董事网络联结的企业,当企业注册地和所属行业类型相同时,传染效应更强.进一步研究发现,该传染效应促进了企业金融化,降低企业的创新投入,不利于企业长期发展,而完善公司治理可以起到一定的缓解作用.在进行一系列稳健性检验后,本文基准结论依然成立.本文研究结论对于政府进行宏观政策跨周期调节,保持宏观政策连续性、稳定性、可持续性具有重要启示意义.

The contagion effect of firms’perception of economic policy uncertainty is a novel perspective for studying economic policy uncertainty issues.This paper employs a text-based method to measure Chinese listed firm’s perceptions of economic policy uncertainty from 2008 to 2018 based on their annual reports.Then,we study the contagion effect of firm’s perception of economic policy uncertainty from the perspective of interlocking board network embeddedness.We find that peer firms play a vital role in determining the perception of economic policy uncertainty.In particular,when firms embed themselves in interlocking board networks,firms’perception of economic policy uncertainty among connected firms has significant contagion effect;that is,a firm’s perception of economic policy uncertainty responds to its peer firms’perception of economic policy uncertainty.The above contagion effect is more prominent when a firm’s industry type is the same as its peer firms’industry types or when a firm’s headquarters location is the same as its peer firms’headquarters locations.Furthermore,we show that the above contagion effect exerts some negative consequences,such as reducing firms’R&D investment and facilitating firms’financialization behavior.In addition,this paper finds that corporate governance plays a positive role in alleviating the negative consequences of the above contagion.Our main findings still hold after a series of robustness checks.Our findings provide insightful implications for policymakers about how to improve macroeconomic policy continuity,stability and sustainability.