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Keywords

digital finance, enterprise innovation performance, management heterogeneity, threshold effect

Abstract

Digital finance, empowered by science and technology, can minimize information asymmetry as well as resource mismatch and relieve financing constraints, providing new opportunities for enterprise innovation. This paper selects the panel data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2019 as a sample, combining the digital finance index based on the registered region of the listed enterprise, from two research perspectives of direct impact effect and threshold mechanism impact effect, and empirically analyzes the impact of the digital finance on the performance of enterprise innovation. In terms of the measurement of enterprise innovation performance, this paper selects R&D investment intensity and patent quantity respectively, facing the two aspects of enterprise innovation input and output. The research results show that there is a significant positive promotion effect between the digital finance and the innovation performance of enterprises, and it still has a significant promotion effect after a series of robustness tests, such as replacement of dependent variables and explanatory variables, excluding municipalities directly under the central government, lagging for a period of time and the introduction of instrumental variables. This is because digital finance plays a positive role in reducing enterprise financing costs, easing financing constraints and reducing information asymmetry, which can effectively solve the problems faced by enterprises in the process of innovation. In addition, while focusing on the output side of innovation and dividing patents into invention patents and non-invention patents, we found that digital finance has a more obvious positive promoting effect on invention patents. As a kind of financial spillover, digital finance has the characteristics of scale effect and can accelerate capital accumulation and has a nonlinear influence on enterprise innovation performance. Base on the impact analysis of the threshold mechanism, it is proved that the digital finance has a nonlinear characteristic of marginal increase in the improvement of enterprise innovation performance, and its marginal increasing effect is more obvious on the innovation output side compared with innovation input side. The interaction terms between digital finance and three types of management heterogeneity, namely management age, education level, and tenure, were cited to further explore the moderating effect of management heterogeneity on the impact of digital finance on enterprise innovation performance. The results show that there is a negative moderating effect, that is, management heterogeneity weakens the promoting effect of digital finance on enterprise innovation performance. This is because an enterprise with a bigger difference in the management level will have a bigger difference in the values of its staff, and it will be difficult for managers to trust each other, which will not be conducive to the construction of digital finance within the enterprise and seriously affect the positive role of digital finance in the improvement of enterprise innovation performance. The research in this article provides certain policy recommendations for the development of digital finance and the improvement of enterprise innovation performance in listed enterprises of China, and provides some experience reference for the management on how to improve enterprise innovation performance in the digital development of China.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2023.03.005

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