债务保守、市场竞争与上市公司资本投资

运用1999~2008年中国上市公司的不平衡动态面板数据模型进行实证分析。研究结论表明:公司的债务保守行为与公司未来的资本投资显著相关;公司的债务保守行为与公司面临的市场竞争激烈程度不存在显著性相关。同时,股利分配会促进公司的资本投资;公司规模对公司的投资具有正面作用。这些都表明公司债务保守的目的是为了未来的资本投资,而并非由产品市场竞争所导致。     

The role of political ties and political uncertainty in corporate innovation

We examine the relationship between firms' political connections and corporate innovation in a European context. We also consider the moderating effect of political connections on the relationship between political uncertainty and firms' innovation. We use two different metrics of innovation: R&D (an input measure), and patent counts (an output measure). We find that firms with former politicians on their board of directors invest less in R&D than their counterpart firms. However, the presence of this type of director on the board is positively associated with the number of a firm's patent applications. It seems that, although political ties reduce the amount of resources devoted to R&D activities, they increase the effectiveness of intellectual rights protection. Results also show that political uncertainty decreases R&D investment but exacerbates the need for legal protection of innovation through patents. According to our results, political connections attenuate the effect of political uncertainty on firm innovation such that the negative (positive) effect of uncertainty on R&D intensity (patents) weakens when the firm is politically connected.     

Unfavorable Market Conditions,Institutional and Financial Development,and Exits of Foreign Subsidiaries

In this paper, we examine how market conditions in host countries affect the entry and exit decisions of multinational corporations' foreign subsidiaries. Taking the real options perspective, we expect that smaller investments will be associated with more flexible entries and exits. We also predict that better-established host countries with greater institutional and financial development will facilitate the exits of foreign subsidiaries with smaller investments under unfavorable market conditions. We run a Cox proportional hazard rate model with a dataset of Korean foreign direct investments, and find that when market conditions become more unfavorable, foreign subsidiaries making smaller investments that were endogenously chosen under the influence of market demand uncertainty are more likely to engage in earlier exits than subsidiaries making larger investments. We also find that strong institutional and financial development positively moderates small subsidiaries' exits under conditions of unfavorably resolved uncertainty.     

Environmental Factors,Managerial Processes,and Information Technology Investment Strategies

Although significant research attention has been directed at understanding the value of information technology (IT) investments for firms, very little attention has been paid to understand the IT investment behavior of firms. This article seeks to fill this void. We introduce the concept of IT investment strategy, defined by dimensions of intensity and proactiveness, to characterize the IT investment behavior of firms. Synthesizing the environmental deterministic and strategic choice perspectives of a firm's strategic decision making, we examine the effects of environmental factors, managerial processes, and the interplay between them on IT investment strategy. Specifically, we examine the impact of environmental factors such as industry clockspeed and information intensity on IT investment strategy. We also incorporate the strategic choice perspective to argue that managerial processes such as frequent chief executive officer—chief information officer communications and collective information systems planning play a critical role in shaping the firm's IT investment strategy. The empirical results show that the environmental variables are related to IT investment strategy. Besides, managerial processes serve as a means to understand the environment and thus moderate the relationships between the environmental variables and the various facets of IT investment strategy. The conceptualization of IT investment strategy and the focus on both environmental determinism and strategic choice should enrich our understanding of firms’ IT investing behavior.     

社会保险与家庭金融风险资产投资

社会保险是否影响家庭在金融风险资产中的投资决策呢?本文使用两期家庭最优决策模型得到的理论分析结果表明,社会保险不仅能够提高家庭在风险资产中的投资广度和深度,而且对于不确定性更大、风险承受更强家庭的影响更为显著.基于省级层面得到的宏观实证检验结果和基于2011年家庭金融调查数据得到家庭层面的微观实证检验结果都支持了上述理论结论.本文的发现对于协调社会保险发展和建立多层级金融市场具有很强的政策意义.     

Relative Performance Evaluation and Risk Taking in Delegated Investment Decisions*

Providing proper incentives to firm managers is increasingly important in the current competitive environment. Analytical research has suggested that evaluating a manager's performance relative to that of a peer group, in conjunction with standard-based pay, can induce efficient risk-sharing between firm owners and managers while maintaining the latter's incentives to exert effort. To date, direct empirical tests of this proposition have not been reported. This study uses a laboratory experiment to test the effect of relative performance evaluation on the risk-aversion of delegated investment decisions. Project-specific risk is operationalized using operating leverage, in part because the variability of a project's operating profits generally increases with this variable, and in part because many of the new manufacturing approaches held to be important to competitive advantage require significant capital investments and attendant increases in operating leverage. Across two levels of environmental uncertainty, subjects under a relative (as opposed to absolute) performance standard selected investments with significantly higher project-specific risk. Also, as environmental uncertainty increased, subjects under an absolute standard significantly reduced the riskiness of their investments. In contrast, subjects shielded from environmental uncertainty by a relative standard chose investments of about equal riskiness under both low and high uncertainty conditions. If supported by future research, these findings would suggest that relative performance evaluation may reduce managers' reluctance to adopt risky capital investments, especially in firms operating in high-risk economic or technological environments.     

契约型战略联盟的灵活性期权价值研究

当面对较高程度的不确定性时,企业可以选择契约型战略联盟作为战略投资的治理模式,根据相关不确定因素的发展变化而选择不同的合作伙伴,这样,不但确保了战略投资灵活期权价值的实现,而且此治理模式本身也具有较灵活的期权价值.契约型联盟可以分为紧密型战略联盟和松散型战略联盟.本文应用期权动态规划定价模型,对紧密型联盟治理模式和松散型联盟契约治理模式的灵活性期权价值做了模型分析,并进行了相关参数的敏感性比较.分析结果表明,在一定范围内.当战略投资相关因素的不确定性程度较高时,应该选择较灵活的治理模式,如松散型战略联盟.     

How do shareholders influence international firms’ environmental strategies? The differential impact of strategic and financial investors

Debates about the drivers of corporate environmental strategy as well as the influence of shareholders on environmental investments have grown exponentially in the last decade. This paper provides a novel perspective on the influence of investors on a firm's environmental strategy by theorizing how the shareholders' orientation may provide different resources for firms to outperform environmental institutional pressures, and further analyzing how foreign market exposure moderates this relationship. Our results, produced from a longitudinal sample of 2237 observations between 2007 and 2017 from 276 US firms in 11 industries, show that having a higher percentage of strategic shareholders positively drives firms' environmental proactivity. Meanwhile, having a higher percentage of financial shareholders is positively related to firms' environmental proactivity only at high levels of foreign market exposure, but is negatively related at low levels. Our results contribute to the ownership and environmental strategy literature by delimitating the different influences of strategic and financial investors on firms' environmental strategy and making a bridge between institutional and resource-based perspectives.     

经济政策不确定性与风险承担:基于风险投资的证据

将经济政策不确定性引入风险投资的决策模型,从理论上证明经济政策不确定性既直接降低风险承担,也负向影响风险投资退出绩效间接降低风险承担.利用1996年~2016年中国经济政策不确定性与风险投资的匹配数据,实证结果支持理论预期.研究发现,经济政策不确定性较高时,风险承担显著更低,表现为风险投资对早期阶段企业和高科技企业的投资比例下降.退出绩效在经济政策不确定性与风险承担之间具有中介作用.经济政策不确定性较高时,风险投资通过IPO或者并购成功退出的交易数目更少、退出期限更长、退出收益更低,因而降低风险承担研究表明,为引导风险投资支持早期高科技企业,除通过财政、税收等政策扶 持奖励风险投资外,政府有必要维持相关政策的稳定性和延续性.     

Process Improvement,Learning, and Real Options

We use a real‐options approach to analyze investments in process improvement. We develop a simple, stochastic model of a firm making investment decisions in process improvement. Our analysis offers several interesting insights into investments in process improvement. First, early investment in process improvement results in valuable knowledge, which helps increase the value of the option to invest in process improvement in future periods. This may motivate a firm to invest in process improvements as early as possible. Second, it may be optimal for a firm to stop investing when such investments do not create enough value in the later stages of the investment horizon. Third, although one would expect the state of a firm's process relative to that of other firms to impact a firm's decision to invest in process improvement, this study finds that the impetus is conditional and identifies these conditions. Finally, in such an environment, the delay of investment in process improvement incurs an opportunity cost for a firm, and we show that the traditional net present value rule must incorporate this opportunity cost and the knowledge‐induced change in future option values to lead to a correct investment decision.     

Organizational Form,Ownership Structure and Corporate Performance: A Contextual Empirical Analysis of UK Companies1

This paper contributes to the literature on organizational form and performance (the performance-conduct paradigm) by examining the impact of two sets of variables that have not been examined previously: measures of environmental uncertainty and alternative forms of controlling separation of ownership from control. The paper first examines the extent to which contextual variables such as perceived environmental uncertainty and age of the organizational form moderate the relationship between organizational form and corporate performance. Next, the paper extends the analysis by examining the possible effects of ownership and control structures on performance. Measures suggested by agency theory, such as conventional ownership proxies (i.e. proportion of shares held by identifiable, homogenous groups), the proportion of non-executive board members and Fama and Jensen's concept of separation of decision management from decision control are used in the analysis. The results indicate that these measures have direct impact on corporate performance in their own right, though the main impact is indirect through interactions with organizational form variables.     

Multiobjective investment planning under uncertainty

In this paper we consider the relevance of various planning methods and decision criteria to multiobjective investment planning under uncertainty. Assuming that a natural reaction to uncertainty is to operate so as to leave open as many good options as possible (as opposed to maximizing subjective expected utility) we argue that the planning process should concentrate on analyzing the effects of the initial decision, and that for this exercise the classical methods of mixed integer programming are inappropriate. We demonstrate how the technique of dynamic programming can be extended to take account of multiple objectives and use dynamic programming as a framework in which we analyze the robustness of an initial decision in the face of various types of uncertainty. In so doing we also analyze the risks involved in both the planning and decision making functions.     

基于削减量与交易费用的垄断厂商治污技术投资决策模型研究

在排污权交易背景下,引入排污削减量和交易费用率参数,应用实物期权方法,分别建立了无交易费用和有交易费用条件下垄断厂商治污技术投资决策模型。研究表明,排污削减量与厂商的投资临界值成反比例关系,与投资价值成正比例关系;而交易费用推迟了厂商的投资时机,削弱了厂商的投资价值,影响了厂商引入治污技术和参与排污权交易的积极性。     

Forgoing the Flexibility of Real Options: When and Why Firms Commit to Investment Decisions*

Real option investments benefit from the flexibility associated with the possibility of abandonment should investment returns prove insufficient. But a firm also benefits from making commitments that engender reciprocal commitments on the part of employees and partner firms, and that allow the firm to address markets that exhibit increasing returns with the speed and scale required for success. I investigate the conditions under which large firms commit to investments in small firm equity alliances and acquisitions, and find that large firms commit to relationships that they initiate and that are subject to a high degree of rivalry. Uncertainty was not a significant predictor of the choice to commit. My findings point to the discretionary nature of the choice to commit and to firms' willingness to commit to investment decisions, despite high uncertainty, during periods of strong growth.     

Location-boundedness,investment irreversibility,and divestment of international joint ventures under host market demand uncertainty

We employ the real options perspective to examine how the irreversibility of location-bound assets and resources affects the divestment of international joint ventures (IJVs) under exogenous uncertainty in host countries. Utilizing a large sample of Korean IJVs and addressing a sample selection of IJVs and the endogeneity of firms’ choice of location-bound investments, we find that high host market demand uncertainty interacts with localized products or local sales forces and reduces divestment rates of IJVs. We also find that the deterrent effects of these two country-specific investments are more salient for IJVs with local sourcing and sales. These findings imply that the deterrent effect of location-boundedness is congruent with the uncertainty-based real options theory when explaining IJV divestment.     

Marketing as an Investment in Shareholder Value

We present resource‐based and capability‐based arguments of marketing investment intensity to offer a strategic view of marketing as an investment in shareholder value. We find that marketing investment intensity has a U‐shaped quadratic effect on shareholder value creation (Tobin's q) that calls for marketing investment to be protected and increased, not surrendered. We show how marketing investments interact with investments in R&D, human capital and operations to reveal how strategic co‐investments can alter the shareholder value of marketing. Finally, we show how competitive intensity and failings in the firm's investment productivity (its ability to convert investment expenditure into sales) point to malaise in the firm's own strategic architecture as a fault for perceived poor returns from marketing investments. Our findings suggest that marketing investment should not be scapegoated when its contributions to shareholder value are not as expected. When invested in strategically and in combination with other investments, marketing can unlock exciting improvements in shareholder value.     

The impact of tax uncertainty on irreversible investment

Traditional models of capital budgeting with taxes are based on deterministic tax rates and tax bases. In reality, however, there are multiple sources of tax uncertainty. Frequent tax reforms make future taxation of investments a stochastic process. Fiscal authorities and tax courts create additional tax uncertainty by interpreting current tax laws differently. Moreover, simplified models that anticipate the actual tax base incorrectly contribute to tax uncertainty as perceived by investors. I analyze the effects of stochastic taxation on investment behavior in a real options model. The investor holds an option to invest in an irreversible project with stochastic cash flows and stochastic tax payments. Pre-tax cash flows and tax payments are assumed to be correlated. Increased tax uncertainty has an ambiguous impact on investment timing. For low tax uncertainty, high cash flow uncertainty and high correlation of cash flows and tax payments, increased tax uncertainty is likely to accelerate investment. A higher expected tax payment delays investment. A higher after-tax discount rate affects investment timing ambiguously.     

Competitive Goals and Plant Investment in Environment and Safety Practices: Moderating Effect of National Culture

Operations managers clearly play a critical role in targeting plant‐level investments toward environment and safety practices. In principle, a “rational” response would be to align this investment with senior management's competitive goals for operational performance. However, operations managers also are influenced by contingent factors, such as their national culture, thus creating potential tension that might bias investment away from a simple rational response. Using data from 1,453 plants in 24 countries, we test the moderating influence of seven of the national cultural characteristics on investment at the plant level in environment and safety practices. Four of the seven national cultural characteristics from GLOBE (i.e., uncertainty avoidance, in‐group collectivism, future orientation and performance orientation) shifted investment away from an expected “rational” response. Positive bias was evident when the national culture favored consistency and formalized procedures and rewarded performance improvement. In contrast, managers exhibited negative bias when familial groups and local coalitions were powerful, or future outcomes—rather than current actions—were more important. Overall, this study highlights the critical importance of moving beyond a naïve expectation that plant‐level investment will naturally align with corporate competitive goals for environment and safety. Instead, the national culture where the plant is located will influence these investments, and must be taken into account by senior management.     

A neuroscience-based model of why and when CEO social values affect investments in corporate social responsibility

Why and when do CEOs invest in corporate social responsibility (CSR)? We theorize how CEOs' intrinsic motivations – their social values – and the incentivizing context interact to determine the utility they attach to generating collectively beneficial outcomes in decision-making, subsequently manifested in organizations' CSR investments. Based on a review of neuroscience evidence, indicating that social values are associated with distinct patterns of neural activation, we propose that these values are the compass by which CEOs navigate in complex decision environments. For CEOs with other-regarding values, generating collectively beneficial outcomes is part and parcel of their utility function. They are intrinsically motivated to invest in CSR, regardless of context. In contrast, CEOs with self-regarding values derive utility from generating collective benefits only when it is monetarily or socially incentivized. They are extrinsically motivated to invest in CSR when they stand to gain from it personally.     

序列投资下的石油勘探投资最优时机选择

综合考虑石油勘探投资的不可逆性、序列性和不确定性，结合市场需求和勘探储量的不确定性刻画勘探储量转让价格的随机动态变化，运用实物期权思想下的序列投资决策方法探究了石油勘探项目的最优投资时机选择问题，得出各阶段最优投资时机临界值的解析表达式，并与一次性完成投资的决策结果进行对比，进而剖析了不确定性参数对各阶段最优投资时机的影响。结果表明，序列投资决策模型能够弥补一次性投资决策模型容易错失投资机会的局限性；各阶段最优投资时机临界值同市场需求波动率、勘探主体价格控制能力呈同向变动，同市场需求漂移率呈反向变动；随勘探进程的不断深入，最优勘探投资时机临界值对以上参数的敏感性程度不断增强。