研发投入对企业绩效的影响研究 ——基于企业金融化水平门限回归

本文选取1435家A股上市公司2011—2018年度的面板数据,以企业金融化水平作为门限变量,研究企业研发投入对企业绩效的非线性影响关系。研究结果表明:(1)企业金融化行为给研发投入对企业绩效的促进作用带来严重的时滞效应,研发投入对当年企业绩效不存在促进作用;(2)研发投入对未来一年企业绩效有双门限效应,二者呈倒N型关系,在第二区间内研发投入促进未来一年企业绩效;研发投入对未来二年企业绩效有单门限效应,在第一区间内研发投入促进未来二年企业绩效;(3)在适度的企业金融化水平区间内,研发投入才会促进未来企业绩效。本文指出上市公司金融化水平最优区间占比分布具有区域、行业和企业性质异质性,并进一步基于实证研究结果提出了相应的政策建议,有利于企业合理管理研发投入和防止企业脱实向虚。     

Delegation,R&;D and competitiveness in a Bertrand duopoly

This paper studies the profitability of centralized investments in R&D versus decentralized price determination in a duopoly for Bertrand consumer markets. As a direct effect, R&D investments lower the firm’s production costs and thus increase c.p. the firm’s profits. However, as an indirect effect, lowering production costs causes market reactions and alters the competition between the firm and its competitors. In the extreme, aggressive competition can occur that diminish an investing firm’s profits. Delegating the price decision using an incentive contract distorts a manager’s perceived costs and induces a virtual cost increase in equilibrium. Trading off the factual cost reduction against a virtual cost increase we find that competition makes strategic delegation more attractive compared to investments in R&D. If firms are allowed to apply both strategies in combination, they concentrate on just one of them for strategic considerations.     

Disentangling reciprocal relationships between R&D intensity,profitability and capital market performance: A panel VAR analysis

Research and development (R&D) investments are strategic choices that firms make to create and sustain competitive advantage. Extant literature proposes that firms’ R&D investments and their profitability and capital market performance are reciprocally related. However, the direction of these relationships and their temporal nature are unclear. We take a real options perspective to argue that the long-run firm performance effects of R&D investments are better than their short-term ones, and that the initial level of R&D intensity influences the nature of these relationships. We apply panel vector autoregression (P-VAR) to a sample of 6623 U.S. firms over the 1990–2020 period in order to test our hypotheses. Our results indicate that increases in R&D intensity have negative effects on profitability in the short term, yet these effects diminish relatively quickly. The effects of increases in R&D intensity on capital market performance are positive and persist over time. Consistent with our predictions, they are contingent on the initial levels of R&D intensity and performance. The findings are fundamentally in line with the real options perspective employed here, yet they add important nuance to our understanding of when, how, and under which conditions R&D investments and firm performance affect one another.     

Production,Process Investment,and the Survival of Debt‐Financed Startup Firms

Whether to invest in process development that can reduce the unit cost and thereby raise future profits or to conserve cash and reduce the likelihood of bankruptcy is a key trade‐off faced by many startup firms that have taken on debt. We explore this trade‐off by examining the production quantity and cost reducing R&D investment decisions in a two period model wherein a startup firm must make a minimum level of profit at the end of the first period to survive and operate in the second period. We specify a probabilistic survival measure as a function of production and investment decisions to track and manage the risk exposure of the startup depending on three key market factors: technology, demand, and competitor's cost. We develop managerial insights by characterizing how to create operational hedges against the bankruptcy risk: if a startup makes a “conservative” investment decision, then it also selects an optimal quantity that is less than the monopoly level and hence sacrifices some of first period expected profits to increase its survival chances. If it decides to invest “aggressively,” then it produces more than the monopoly level to cover the higher bankruptcy risk. We also illustrate that debt constraint shrinks the decision space, wherein such process investments are viable.     

CLUSTERING IN N‐PLAYER PREEMPTION GAMES

We study a complete information preemption game in continuous time. A finite number of firms decide when to make an irreversible, observable investment. Upon investment, a firm receives flow profits, which decrease in the number of firms that have invested. The cost of investment declines over time exogenously. We characterize the subgame‐perfect equilibrium outcome, which is unique up to a permutation of players. When the preemption race among late investors is sufficiently intense, the preemption incentive for earlier investors disappears, and two or more investments occur at the same time. We identify a sufficient condition in terms of model parameters: clustering of investments occurs if the flow profits from consecutive investments are sufficiently close. This shows how clustering can occur in the absence of coordination failures, informational spillovers, or positive payoff externalities.     

International and National R&D Networks in Unionized Oligopoly

We study the endogenous formation of R&D networks between two domestic and one foreign firms in a unionized oligopoly. We find that the equilibrium networks are sensitive to the extent of knowledge spillovers between networked firms. If spillovers are sufficiently low, the complete network will arise in equilibrium; however, if spillovers are sufficiently high, the foreign partial network that includes a domestic and a foreign firm will arise. Moreover, for intermediate spillovers, no equilibrium network emerges. These results have implications for aggregate outcomes: equilibrium networks are not necessarily optimal in terms of aggregate effective R&D and aggregate firm profits.     

创新网络嵌入视角下企业研发竞争的博弈研究

研发投入是创新发展的基础和源泉,如何促进企业研发投入是实施创新驱动战略的关键。本文基于创新网络嵌入的背景,构建同一创新网络内两个企业间的博弈模型,针对不同网络位置企业竞争博弈和相同网络位置企业竞争博弈两种情形,探究在研发竞争状态下企业研发投入受网络地位、网络关系的影响情况。研究结果表明:创新网络嵌入下,同质企业的竞争性研发投入与网络范围的技术溢出、网络平均吸收能力以及网络中心度均存在正向相关关系。研究结论丰富了企业研发投入影响因素的研究成果,也为有效激励企业创新提供一个有价值的思路。     

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.     

Governance Structure,Innovation and Internationalization: Evidence From India

We examine the impact of firm-level governance structure on the innovation and internationalization strategies of emerging market firms. We propose that in the case of emerging market firms, governance is a response to the prevailing institutional environment and affects the innovation and internationalization strategies of firms. Based on a longitudinal sample of 16,337 firm-year observations of Indian listed firms over a year time period from 2002 to 2009, we find a positive effect of family ownership and group affiliation on R&D intensity and new foreign investments. Institutional ownership also positively affects new foreign investments, but has no effect on R&D intensity. Further, we find that R&D intensity interacts with family ownership, institutional ownership and group affiliation in affecting new foreign investments.     

CREDIT CONSTRAINTS AND THE CYCLICALITY OF R&D INVESTMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

We use a French firm‐level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994–2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms’ R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes procyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is only observed for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility; (iii) in more credit‐constrained firms, R&D investment plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns.     

R&D,productivity, and market value: An empirical study from high-technology firms

Although prior research has addressed the influence of production activity and research and development (R&D) on productivity, it is not clear whether production and R&D affect the market value of a firm. This study proposes and verifies an R&D value chain framework to explore the relationship among productivity, R&D, and firm market values, as measured by Tobin's q theory. By doing so, we attempt to link new theoretical insights and empirical evidence on the effects of R&D efforts and basic production activities to the market valuations of high-technology firms. The value chain data envelopment analysis approach was proposed to estimate parallel-serial processes of basic operations and R&D efforts. This approach can be used to simultaneously estimate the profitability efficiency and marketability efficiency of high-technology firms. This area has rarely been studied, but it is particularly important for high-technology R&D policies and for further industrial development. Using the R&D value chain perspectives of model innovations and extensions proposed in several previous studies, we examined the appropriate levels of intermediate outputs. Production efficiency and R&D were combined to estimate the appropriate levels of intermediate outputs for high-technology firms. Based on the intermediate output analyses, we developed an R&D efforts decision matrix to explore and identify operational and R&D efficiency for high-technology firms. Our sample firms are displayed on a four-quadrant action grid that provides visual information on current short-term operational efficiency and decision making on long-term R&D strategic positions. The empirical findings from the R&D value chain model can provide information for policymakers and managers and suggest the adoption of various policies that place more emphasis on profitability and marketability strategies.     

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION IN INNOVATION AND COMPETITION

Innovation is typically a trial‐and‐error process. While some research paths lead to the innovation sought, others result in dead ends. Because firms benefit from their competitors working in the wrong direction, they do not reveal their dead‐end findings. Time and resources are wasted on projects that other firms have already found to be fruitless. We offer a simple model with two firms and two research lines to study this prevalent problem. We characterize the equilibrium in a decentralized environment that necessarily entails significant efficiency losses due to wasteful dead‐end replication and an information externality that leads to an early abandonment of the risky project. We show that different types of firms follow different innovation strategies and create different kinds of welfare losses. In an extension of the core model, we also study a centralized mechanism whereby firms are incentivized to disclose their actions and share their private information in a timely manner. (JEL: O31, D92)     

Task partitioning in new product development teams: A knowledge and learning perspective

R&D alliances and outsourcing elements of the new product development process are now commonplace practices among many firms. However, little previous work has examined how these organizational choices influence project knowledge and learning. Based on a comparison of three new product development projects in the software industry, this paper examines how task partitioning in the project influences learning and knowledge development within the firm. The paper suggests that internal development projects encourage synthetic learning and development of architectural and tacit knowledge; in contrast, outsourcing and joint ventures encourage analytic learning and development of component and explicit knowledge.     

Patents,R&D investments and post-IPO strategies

This paper empirically investigates the effect of going public on the evolution of high-tech entrepreneurial firms, focussing in particular on the interaction between innovation variables and financing and investment strategies. Specifically, I confront the effects of the IPO on firms with higher R&D investments versus firms with more patents. Firms with higher R&D investments typically view the IPO as a mechanism to raise external equity, used to pursue investments and to acquire participation in other companies, whereas those with more patents raise more debt capital and invest less after the IPO, as compared to high-tech entrepreneurial firms. I suggest that a large number of patents is an index of technological maturity for high-tech ventures, even more than age and size, that helps investors to individuate firms with a lower level of risk.     

Firms' R&D Cooperation Behavior in a Supply Chain

This study investigates firms' R&D cooperation behavior in a supply chain where two firms first cooperate in R&D investments and then decide the production quantity according to a wholesale price contract. By using a concept named contribution level that measures a firm's technological contribution to the R&D cooperation in the supply chain, we show that both firms can achieve win–win via cartelization only if their contribution levels are Pareto matched, i.e., when each firm's contribution level is comparable to its partner's. When spillovers are endogenized, we further establish that an increasing spillover always benefits both firms without any R&D cooperation, but only benefits the firm whose contribution level is relatively low when under R&D cartels. Finally, we show that the path of first increasing spillovers to be perfect and then forming a cartel has a higher chance of achieving the best mode in terms of profitability.     

The Impact of Costliness,Competitive Importance,and Modularity of Investments on Outsourcing

This study is motivated by examples of outsourcing that are not readily explained by widely established economic theories. We extend recent literature that develops the idea that outsourcing can help firms avoid overinvestment by specifying more precisely the conditions under which this thesis is likely to apply. Our extension is realized through a two‐period game theoretic model in which the outsourcing and in‐house investments are driven by (1) the cost required to develop a product or process module, (2) competitive relevance, defined as the module's share in the production cost or the module's importance to the customer, and (3) modularity, defined as the extent to which generic investments in the module can approach firm‐specific investments in terms of the overall product/process performance. The analysis generates predictions about what types of insourcing, outsourcing, and non‐sourcing behaviors are likely to emerge in different parts of the parameter space. Outsourcing to a more concentrated industry upstream emerges at equilibrium when modularity is high, relevance low to medium, and development cost high enough that none or only a subset of focal firms wants to invest. While firms are forced to insource and overinvest due to a prisoner's dilemma when the development cost is sufficiently high relative to the module's relevance, we do not find outsourcing equilibria that solve this problem in a two‐period game with no commitment. This result implies that some form of tacit coordination in a multi‐period game may be necessary. We conclude the study with a discussion of empirical implications.     

双寡头R&D合作与非合作时的最优溢出

本文考虑一个双寡头模型,其中两个企业都从事存在溢出的R&D活动。每个企业在产品市场上进行竞争之前,首先确定自己的R&D投资。根据在R&D阶段和产量阶段是否合作,讨论三种情况下使企业利润最大化的溢出水平。在每种情况下,都讨论了溢出的变动对R&D支出、产量、利润、消费者剩余和社会福利的影响。     

政府补贴、所有权性质与企业研发决策

本文将企业研发行为分为"是否研发"和"投入多少"两个阶段,就政府补贴对不同所有制企业研发决策的影响进行研究.理论方面,构建企业研发决策的两阶段模型,讨论了补贴对企业研发投资的作用机制.实证方面,以中国工业企业为对象,选择Heckman两步法和2SLS分别处理了样本选择性偏误及变量间的内生性问题,对来自国有、私营和外资企业的分类样本进行了检验,结果表明:在不同的所有权性质下,政府补贴对企业研发投资的作用存在一定差别,国有企业面对优惠政策的倾斜和需要担负的社会责任,从事技术创新活动的概率较高,但由于特殊的产权关系和预算软约束等原因,缺乏扩大研发投入的动力;对于治理机制完善的外资企业和处于市场竞争弱势地位的私营企业而言,政府补贴的研发激励效果更为明显.     

The Role of Knowledge in Resource Allocation to Exploration versus Exploitation in Technologically Oriented Organizations*

Decisions regarding research and development (R&D) activities of an organization greatly affect the fiscal and market outcomes of technologically oriented firms. Yet, the resource allocation choices between these two activities are tied strongly to an organization's technology knowledge. Technological knowledge is itself a resource that the firm can manage to achieve strategic and competitive advantage. In this paper, the authors present a system dynamics view of the decomposition of R&D efforts into explorative and exploitive activities and the resultant knowledge‐specific and performance outcomes from the decision to focus on one type of activity or another. Four factors are shown to affect the relative value of innovative knowledge to the organization: resource availability, exogenous competition, aging of knowledge bases, and adaptive capacity, a firm's ability to adapt to its environment. A variety of long‐ and short‐term strategic issues are discussed in relation to these forces.     

Sequencing of emphases on technology alliances and internal R&D: The effects of the market cycle

How does the market reward technological firms' emphases on alliancing and R&D strategies depending on the phase in the market cycle? I use the 1990s’ “dot-com bubble” cycle and its burst after 2000 to look for joint effects of technology alliances and internal R&D investments on firm market valuations. I show that the existing theory is incomplete without considering (1) the temporal sequencing of emphases on technology alliances and R&D, and (2) the phase in the market cycle. I show that different phases of the market cycle reward different temporal sequences of emphases on technology alliances and internal R&D. This paper contributes to the theory of complementarity of alliances and R&D by pointing out previously unexplored factors that make technology alliances and R&D investments either complements or substitutes.