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| External Guarantee and Enterprise Innovation Investment |
| CHEN Zeyi, LI Changqing, LI Yukun
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School of Accounting,Guangdong University of Finance;
School of Management, Xiamen University;
School of International Business, Shanxi Normal University |
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Abstract External guarantees are widespread in the Chinese capital market. At the end of 2019, the external guarantees of all A-share listed companies were worth RMB446.8 billion. The 683 companies with external guarantees make up nearly 20% of all Chinese listed companies, and approximately half of these companies (338) have external guarantees that exceed 50% of their net assets. Through risk contagion, the continually increasing size of external guarantees has added to the risk level in the market. Some enterprises have already experienced severe problems due to excessive external guarantees. For example, Shengyun Environmental Protection Group was ultimately delisted and went bankrupt due to significant unpaid guarantee debts. External guarantees can also lead to “thunderclap” events in which one company after the other gets into difficulty, and this has attracted the attention of regulators and investors.
Innovation is the primary driving force for the high-quality development of the Chinese economy. Innovation is also important for individual enterprises, as it helps them break through the bottleneck of development and enhance their core competitiveness. However, innovation requires long-term and continual investment, which in turn requires an enterprise to have a healthy financing ability and an active willingness to innovate. External guarantees not only increase the financing constraints on enterprises but also intensify agency conflicts, which may affect enterprises' willingness to invest and their level of investment in R&D. However, few studies have explored the impact of external guarantees on enterprises' R&D investment.
Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2019, this study examines the impact of external guarantees on enterprise innovation investment, and the underlying mechanism of this impact, from the perspectives of innovation resources and innovation willingness. The results show that external guarantees significantly reduce innovation investment by enterprises, and the impact is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises and technology-intensive industries than in state-owned enterprises and non-technology-intensive industries. The empirical conclusions remain robust to the Heckman two-stage test, propensity score matching, alternative selection of instrumental variables and differences-in-differences analysis to control for endogeneity problems. Further analysis shows that external guarantees force enterprises to reduce innovation investment due to increased debt-financing costs and tighter financing constraints. External guarantees also weaken the willingness of major shareholders and executives to invest in innovation, which ultimately reduces enterprise innovation investment by increasing the agency cost of major shareholders and reducing equity incentives.
This study makes the following contributions to the literature. First, it expands the literature on the economic consequences of external guarantees. The few studies on the impact of external guarantees focus largely on corporate risk, debt financing costs, audit fees and stock price crash risk. In contrast, we examine the impact of external guarantees from the novel perspective of innovation investment.
Second, this study enriches the theoretical understanding of external guarantees. Unlike previous research, we discuss the impact of external guarantees on innovation investment within the framework of risk transfer theory and agency theory. Based on the risk-shifting hypothesis, we investigate how external guarantees weaken the ability of enterprises to obtain innovation resources. Additionally, we explore how external guarantees reduce the innovation willingness of major shareholders and executives, in keeping with agency theory. This provides a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding than previous studies of how external guarantees affect R&D investment.
Third, this study enriches research on the factors influencing innovation investment, as we are among the first to examine the impact of external guarantees on enterprise innovation. This complements previous research on how factors such as financial market development, legal protection, corporate governance, executive characteristics and executive incentives influence innovation investment.
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Received: 29 April 2020
Published: 09 May 2022
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