关键词: 企业金融化, 企业创新, 产业政策, 政策协同, 脱实向虚

Abstract:     Since the 18th CPC National Congress, great achievements have been made in both innovation input and innovation output at the macro level, which cannot be separated from the continuous optimization on the innovation environment by our government. However, the reality that cannot be ignored is that since 2011, such phenomenon as "preferring virtual economy to real economy", "virtual hot but real cold", and "excessive financialization" gradually appears. Specifically, at the micro level, the proportion of financial assets of the enterprises is increasing, and financial assets have increasingly become an important and indispensable part of their balance sheet. On the one hand, since innovation is essentially a kind of behavior with higher market risk, longer investment cycle and greater uncertainty, enterprise could obtain considerable profits by investing in financial assets rather than just relying on innovation input. Thus, if the financialization of the enterprise is based on the motivation to alleviate the financing constraints in the process of innovation, it will have a positive impact on corporate innovation in the long run; On the other hand, if the financialization of the enterprise is based on the motivation of profit-seeking, it will have a negative impact on corporate innovation, and finally result in a lack of sustainable competitiveness in the long run. Therefore, it is of great significance to examine the exact motivation behind corporate financialization, "profit-seeking motivation" or "reservoir motivation"?
   Furthermore, how to avoid or reverse the adverse impact of firms′ "preferring virtual economy to real economy" on corporate innovation has become an increasingly important topic of the academic world, and industrial policy may be one of the various tools. However, there are two opposite views on the validity of industrial policy. Meanwhile, it is still unclear what kind of effect industrial policy has on the relationship between corporation financialization and corporate innovation. Therefore, starting from different motivations of financialization, enterprises may produce completely heterogeneous consequences by obtaining resource supply under the support of industrial policies.
    Based on A-share listed non-financial companies in China from 2009-2017, this paper empirically examines the motivations behind the financialization of entity enterprise and its impact on corporate innovation, focusing on examining the micro mechanism of how corporate financialization influence the corporation innovation from the perspective of industrial policy.
    The results show that: (1) The dominant motive of companies′ financial asset allocation is "speculation arbitrage", and there is a significant "crowding out" effect of financialization on corporate innovation input and innovation output in the current year and next two years. This still holds after dividing the financial assets into four types, such as available-for-sale securities, investment real estate, long-team investment on financial stocks, entrusted and trust investment. Besides, the "crowding out" effect is more sensitive when the firm′s financial constraint is weak. (2) Industrial policy can significantly weaken the "crowding out" effect of corporate financialization on corporate innovation input, which plays a role of "roadblock" between corporate financialization and corporate innovation mainly through government subsidies and administrative control. Meanwhile, this inhibition effect is more sensitive under the coordination of central industrial policy and local industrial policy, which means coordination of central and local industrial policies could also effectively weaken the negative effect of corporate financialization on corporate innovations. However, under the case of non-coordination of central and local industrial policies (central support while local not support, central not support while local support), we don′t find significant evidence that industrial policy could play a role of "Roadblock". (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows that industrial policy significantly weakens the "crowding out" effect of corporate financialization and improves the innovation activities of non-state-owned and high-tech enterprises, while the state-owned enterprises enlarge the "crowding out" effect of corporate financialization with a more obvious speculation incentive. This shows that the development of high-tech and non-state-owned enterprises need more guidance, support and supervision from the government.
    Our contribution is that: on the one hand, we first verify that there exists heterogeneous influence of the motivation behind the corporate financialization on corporate innovation. Next, we deeply excavate the mechanism of how industrial policy weaken the "crowding out" effect of corporate financialization from the perspective of innovation-simulation and resource-supply role of the industrial policy, which expands the prior research on the simple relationship between corporate financialization and innovation. On the other hand, since we find that the current government-leading industrial policies can make up for the companies′ lack of incentives for innovation, especially in China, an emerging economy with imperfect institutional environment, we provide a practical basis for the government to optimize innovation policies and industrial policies and build a more innovative environment to improve the enterprises′ capabilities of innovation input, innovation implementation, and innovation output.

Key words: corporate financialization, corporate innovation, industrial policy, policy coordination, preferring virtual economy to real economy