管理层短视、会计稳健性与企业创新抑制

Managerial Myopia, Accounting Conservatism and Innovation

基于上市公司的专利数据,本文研究了会计稳健性对企业创新能力的影响。分别以发明专利申请数和授权率来衡量企业的创新能力,实证研究发现,会计稳健性越高,企业发明专利申请数越低,发明专利授权率也越低,这表明会计稳健性会抑制企业的创新能力。在进一步检验中还发现,会计稳健性对企业创新的抑制作用会受到管理层短视的影响。本文通过选取三个衡量管理层短视的代理变量——管理层持股、机构投资者持股和企业长期负债发现,管理层越短视,会计稳健性对创新的抑制作用越明显。在进行了一系列稳健性检验之后,实证结果保持不变。本文的结论对于理解会计稳健性在企业创新活动中的作用及如何降低会计稳健性对企业的负面影响具有重要的理论和现实意义。

Based on the patent data, this paper investigates the impact of accounting conservatism on listed firms' innovation. We make hypothesis that accounting conservatism reduce managers' incentive to innovate by affecting how managers recognize the innovation investments in the income statement and how investors estimate the value of innovation projects. On one hand, more conservative accounting requires managers to recognize more expenses in the income statement, which in turn cut down the reported earnings. The negative(or low) earnings have adverse effect on managers' career and compensation. Thus, managers have less incentive to invest in innovation ex ante when financial reporting is more conservative. On the other hand, conservative reporting signal downward bias information of the innovation projects to the market. Once investors receive adverse signals, they underestimate the value of innovation projects and require managers to abandon the innovation projects earlier. Therefore, innovation projects are more likely to be terminated ex post especially when the market pressure is high. Measuring innovation by invention patents and invention patent grant rate, out empirical evidence shows that firms with higher accounting conservatism exhibit not only less invention patents but also have lower invention patent grant rate, which means accounting conservatism impedes innovation. In addition, we also find that managerial myopia affects the relationship between accounting conservatism and innovation. Measuring managerial myopia by managerial shareholding, institutional ownership and long-term debt, we can see that the negative impact of accounting conservatism on innovation is more significant when managers are more myopic. We use alternative accounting conservatism measure and endogeneity tests to validate our main results. Our paper extends the literature of how accounting conservatism affects investments. Prior literature show that accounting conservatism increase investment efficiency by constraining managers to invest in projects with negative net present value(NPV) or high risk. Our findings reveal the dark side of accounting conservatism: it makes managers to avoid investments with positive NPV but high risk, i.e., innovation activities, which are important to firms. Therefore, the optimal level of accounting conservatism should take its adverse effect on innovations into account.