As a new financial business model under the deep integration of digital technology and finance, digital finance has an important impact on high-quality economic development. Based on China′s huge population and emerging new digital economy business models, China′s digital finance continues to innovate business application scenarios, and its scale continues to grow rapidly. Previous studies have shown that digital finance can encourage residents to start businesses and promote firms′ innovation input and output.
However, the existing research on the mechanism of digital finance on innovation has great limitations. The vast majority of studies believe that digital finance mainly works by alleviating the financing constraints of companies themselves, while ignoring the potential path of digital finance affect firm innovation through corporate governance. The main manifestations of agency conflicts of listed companies in China are cash occupation, related transactions and share pledge. Share pledge refers to the behavior of shareholders applying for loans from financial institutions with their stock as pledge objects. The decline in stock prices may cause the controlling shareholder to lose control of the listed company, and the risk of control transfer will intensify the agency conflicts of the controlling shareholder and external shareholders. In order to reduce the risk of share pledge liquidation caused by the decline in stock prices and retain control of listed companies, controlling shareholders may reduce R&D to smooth profits. Surprisingly, there is very little literature on how to prevent and resolve the issue of pledged shares of major shareholders. The essence of controlling shareholder′s equity pledge is financing constraints, that is, the traditional financial system cannot meet the normal commercial financing needs of enterprises or individuals due to various reasons. So, can digital finance meet the financing needs of controlling shareholders and reduce the proportion of share pledges, thereby reducing agency conflicts and promoting corporate R&D? This research will fill this gap.
This paper contributes to the existing literature in several ways．Firstly, this paper expands the mechanism of digital finance influencing corporate innovation based on the perspective of share pledge. Although the existing literature finds that digital finance can promote corporate innovation, it is mainly attributed to the financing constraints of listed companies themselves. Different from the existing research, we find that digital finance can reduce the controlling shareholder share pledge rate, reduce the agency conflict between controlling shareholders and other shareholders, thereby promoting R&D. Secondly, this paper is a useful supplement to the research on how digital finance serves the development of the real economy. Although some papers have tried to analyze the effect of digital finance to the real economy, but the efforts and evidence in this regard are far from enough. The results of this paper show that digital finance can not only alleviate the financing constraints of companies, but also alleviate agency problems by alleviating the financing constraints of the listed company′s stakeholders—controlling shareholders, and promote corporate R&D investment. Thirdly, this study also enriches the literature of share pledge. The existing literature on share pledge mostly focuses on the economic consequences of controlling shareholders′ share pledge, and rarely discusses how to reduce and resolve share pledge risks. From the novel perspective of digital finance, this study examines the inhibitory effect of the development of digital finance on controlling shareholder′s share pledge, thus enriching the related research on share pledge.
In order to fill the blank of related research, this study uses China′s A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018 and the "Digital Financial Inclusive Index" compiled by the Digital Finance Research Center of Peking University to examine the impact of digital financial development on the company′s innovation investment. The results show that: (1) the development of digital finance can significantly promote enterprise innovation investment; (2) The analysis of intermediary effect shows that digital finance can promote enterprise innovation investment by reducing the pledge rate of controlling shareholders and improving corporate governance; (3) Further study also found that the role of digital finance development in promoting enterprise innovation investment through controlling shareholder equity pledge is more significant in private enterprises and non-four audit enterprises.
Key words
digital finance /
corporate innovation investment /
share pledge
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