Cross-listing, Investor Attention and Corporate Innovation: Empirical Study Based on Chinese A-share Listed Companies

Yu Wei; Ning Bo

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.01.004

Summary

The theory of modern economic growth reveals that technological progress and knowledge innovation are important factors in determining economic growth （Romer, 1990）. Especially in current critical macroeconomic situation with continuous downward pressure, the Chinese governments from central to local are vigorously promoting the national strategy named " mass entrepreneurship and innovation”. With the aim of vitalizing the innovation level of domestic enterprises and restructuring and upgrading the economy, the governments are trying to create a good environment for enterprises’ innovation at both regulatory and policy levels. Nevertheless, low research and development （R&D） investment and poor quality of technological innovation have been the current indisputable fact. The existing research on enterprise innovation is primarily based on internal governance perspectives and external factors （Acs and Audertsch, 1988; Hall, 1993; Akcomak and Weel, 2009; Gayle, 2011）, without the consideration of the impact of different investor attention on company innovation decisions due to cross-listing. Firms that are listed on multiple markets through cross-listing receive investor attention from two or more capital markets, which may lead to the variance of innovation activity choices. Compared with domestic individual investors who adopt the speculative strategy in the main capital market, institutional investors as the main body in developed capital markets prefer to invest in enterprises with potential. Corporate innovation activities are usually regarded as important means of improving enterprise value by foreign investors （Monte and Papgni, 2003）, which explains the underlying fact that why foreign investors prefer to invest in innovative activities. Business managers with the aim of maintaining or enhancing corporate value may consider conducting a higher level of innovative activities to attract the attention from foreign investors. In contrast, individual investors who focus on short-term gains are more concerned about the short-term volatility of stock prices rather than the specific business activities （innovation activities）. Therefore, the concern of domestic investors does not significantly affect the business managers of innovative decision-making. Using A-share, " A+H”-share, and " A+B”-share companies （excluding financial enterprises） from 2007 to 2014 as samples, we explore the internal relationship between cross-listing and innovation activities from the perspective of investor concerns by using PSM and multiple linear regression models. It finds that cross-listed companies have a higher level of innovation than those companies listed only on A-share markets. By examining the types of cross-listing, the effect of cross-listing promotion only exists in the cross-border " A+H”market, and yet the results of the " A+B”-listed companies are not obvious, indicating that investors in different markets may affect innovation activities. And another indicator to measure the heterogeneity of investor concern is the proportion of domestic and foreign investors. We find that there is a significantly positive correlation between the proportion of foreign investors holdings and business innovation investment, indicating that firms with a higher level of innovation obtain higher investment with investor attention which verifies ceteris paribus that foreign investor attention is the mechanism for cross-listing to promote innovative activities. The results of this paper enrich the relevant literature by exploring innovation motivations, and expound the impact of cross-listing on corporate financial behavior from the perspective of domestic and foreign investors. It is found that the introduction of overseas investors facilitates the innovation of enterprises and their attention to the long-term value of innovation can be used as a reasonable interpretation of the mechanism. Secondly, it helps to understand the innovation behavior of enterprises under the condition of imperfect formal system in Chinese market, and the results also provide empirical reference for regulators to formulate effective and long-term innovation incentive mechanism. In addition, current cross-listed enterprises are mostly state-owned property holding enterprises, and the introduction of foreign investors is conducive to the efficiency improvement of state-owned enterprises, which promotes the deepening reform of state-owned enterprises.