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| Does Entrusted Investment Distract Listed Firms from Their Intended Purpose? From the Perspective of Corporate Innovation |
| HAO Xiangchao
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| School of Economics, Nankai University |
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Abstract The scale of entrusted investment among China's listed firms has grown rapidly over the past decade, adding up to trillions of RMB. However, many listed firms use money raised by initial public offerings, seasoned equity offerings, and issued bonds to buy entrusted investments, provoking fierce criticism from the media and heavy attention from supervisory agencies. As a result, the China Securities Regulatory Commission has intensified disclosure regulations on entrusted investments by modifying policies, disciplining listed firms to focus on their core business, and thus effectively stopping them being distracted from their intended purpose. Nonetheless, most firms claim in their announcements that the purpose of buying entrusted investments is to increase the efficient use of idle funds. In this case, what is China's listed firms' real purpose in buying such a huge amount of entrusted investments？ Is it simply good financial management, or a sign that firms are distracted from their intended purpose？ Unfortunately, these questions have been underexplored.
This paper addresses these questions from the perspective of corporate innovation, and develops an agency problem hypothesis and financial management hypothesis to explain whether and how buying entrusted investments affects corporate innovation. Using detailed data on entrusted investments and patents from 2008 to 2017, this paper empirically tests two hypotheses. The main findings are threefold. First, innovation quality decreases significantly as the amount of entrusted investment and the contribution of its returns to income increase, while innovation quantity does not. Second, the impacts of entrusted investments from commercial banks and non-banks on innovation quality are both negative, while their impacts on innovation quantity are opposites. These conflicting impacts may offset each other, explaining the insignificant effect overall. Lastly, listed firms prefer to engage in exploitative innovation rather than exploratory innovation as entrusted investments increase. In particular, innovations of firms that buy more entrusted investments from banks are more opportunistic, while innovations of firms that buy more from non-banks are more passive.
This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, although the extant literature has focused on the characteristics, motivations, risks, and agency problems of listed firms' entrusted investment in China since roughly 2000 (Chen and Ding, 2002, He and Wang, 2005), few studies have explored the determinants of recent entrusted investment and its impact on earnings volatility (Sun et al., 2016; Hu et al.,2019). Thus this paper extends the literature by analyzing entrusted investment's impact on corporate innovation.
Second, the literature has found that listed firms' financialization through investing in bonds, equities, derivatives, real estate, and entrusted loans can affect innovation input and output (Yu and Li, 2016; Du et al., 2017; Liu, 2017), yet it ignores the important impact of financialization through other entrusted investments that are recorded in the accounts of other current assets. This paper fills this gap by investigating the impact of buying entrusted investments from commercial banks and trust companies, enriching the literature on the economic effect of listed firms' financialization.
Lastly, due to the unavailability of detailed data on patents in China, most of the existing literature has studied corporate innovation in terms of R&D expenditures and number of patents (Wen and Feng, 2012; Feng et al., 2017;Zhang et al.,2019) rather than innovation quality and strategy (Li and Zheng, 2016; Hao et al., 2018). This paper examines the impacts of entrusted investment on innovation quality and on exploratory versus exploitative innovation, enriching the literature on innovation strategy.
This paper's findings will be helpful for supervisory agencies aiming to improve entrusted investment regulations.Many firms successfully raise money and then buy entrusted investments rather than invest in the planned projects. Such financing is vulnerable to expropriation, and it suggests that listed firms lack an effective investment plan. In contrast, many small and mid-sized firms that are prospective find it difficult to raise money to facilitate innovation. As a result, attempts to regulate entrusted investment should also consider how the capital market can effectively facilitate corporate innovation.
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Received: 06 December 2018
Published: 30 March 2020
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