China Industrial Economics is supervised by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and sponsored by Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It aims to report researches on industrial economics and business management, and to reflect outstanding research results on Chinese industrial economy and enterprise development. The scope covers national economy, industrial economy and business management. The journal is included in CSSCI, and is the top journal in the field of industrial economics in China.
Whether the liberalization of stock market can increase the market efficiency is a topic focused on by both the government and academics. Using the setting of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect (HSC) in 2014, we examined its effect on corporate investment. It was found that the implementation of HSC is associated with an increase in investment sensitivity to stock price through the channels of increasing the stock price informativeness and affecting financing, suggesting that implementation of HSC can strengthen stock price’s role to guide firms’ investment. Further analysis showed that the increase of investment sensitivity to stock price following the implementation of HSC is only evident for firms with international operations, lower transparency and higher agency costs, and stated-owned enterprises. In conclusion, our evidence suggests that through the improvement of the investor structure and stock price informativeness, the implementation of HSC can increase the allocation role of stock price, better perform the guiding effect of capital market on real economic activity through the channel of information feedback and financing, and finally increase the market efficiency.
In recent years, how China should achieve industrial upgrading has received extensive attention from academia. In the final analysis, industrial upgrading is whether the representative enterprises in the industry have achieved optimization and upgrading. The Belt and Road Initiative is proposed in the context of China’s economy entering the new normal, it has important research significance for the impact of China’s enterprise upgrading. The paper took the quasi-natural experiment formed by the Belt and Road Initiative as the entry point, used the DID model and studied the impact and path of the Belt and Road Initiative on the upgrading of China’s enterprises. The study found that the Belt and Road Initiative can significantly promote the upgrading of China’s enterprises characterized by improving total factor productivity. The above conclusions remain robust after using the instrumental variable approach to mitigate possible endogeneity problems and perform other robustness tests. Further, the paper divided China’s industries into emerging industries, mature industries and bottleneck industries based on the theory of industry life cycle, and analyzed the path of the Belt and Road Initiative affecting the upgrading of enterprises in various industries from the perspective of innovation. Combined with empirical analysis, the following results are obtained: the Belt and Road Initiative can promote the upgrading of enterprises in all industries through innovation, and has the greatest impact on the upgrading of enterprises in bottleneck industries, followed by emerging industries and mature industries. In addition, the paper also conducted a subsample regression based on the nature of ownership. The results show that the Belt and Road Initiative can simultaneously promote the upgrading of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises. This conclusion means that in the advance of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s economic development has formed a new pattern that both the state enterprises and the private sectors advance. The paper not only provides micro evidence for the Belt and Road Initiative affecting the upgrading of enterprises, but also has important theoretical implication for the country to formulate policies, and has certain reference value for the follow-up deployment of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Improving the domestic value-added ratio (DVAR) of exports is an important choice to realize the transformation and upgrading of foreign trade and to move towards the middle to high end of the global value chain (GVC). Based on the complete decomposition data of China’s total exports at the country-sector level and the quasi-natural experiment of China’s entry into WTO, this paper examines the impact and mechanism of import liberalization on China’s export DVAR from the meso-and macro-level. The research shows that reducing import tariffs, especially for intermediate goods and raw materials, will significantly help increase export DVAR. Difference-in-difference (DID) validity analysis and a series of robustness analyses show that the basic conclusions are quite robust. Further results indicate that (1) the impact of import liberalization on low-to-middle GVC position is significantly positive; (2) the impact on high-level GVC position is not significant; (3) implementing import liberalization with developed economies significantly improves the export DVAR of intermediate goods. The mechanism analysis shows that import liberalization has a positive effect on export DVAR (effect of input quality) by improving the quality rather than the quantity of inputs. At the same time, import liberalization improves the proportion of pure domestic factors and export DVAR (effect of structural factor) by promoting the transformation of industries towards high skilled labor-intensive direction. In the global context of rising trade protectionism, this study provides new empirical evidence for policies that support trade liberalization, while emphasizing the importance for developing economies to implement intermediate import liberalization towards developed economies in moving towards the higher end of the GVC.
From the perspectives of path, community and neighbors, this paper puts forward the theoretical hypothesis of enterprises’ decision on outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) under export network. With CEPII-BACI database, China Customs Database and OFDI enterprise catalogue from 2000–2011, this paper constructs the econometric model to test the hypothesis by adopting the network analysis method. This paper captures the export network of enterprises and their neighbors from the perspective of geographic and economic connections. Using community analysis method, this paper divides 196 economies into 45 communities, which respectively identifies the path effects, community effects, and neighbor effects of export network on Chinese enterprises’ decision on OFDI location. This paper finds that: ① The Chinese enterprises’ decision on OFDI location depends on the structure of export network, tending to choose the regions with economic and the geographical proximity within community as the host countries. ② The enterprises’ decision on OFDI depends on the community distribution of the export network. The path effect of OFDI within the export network community is significantly larger than that outside the community, and enterprises tend to make OFDI within the community. ③ The export network of neighboring enterprises significantly affects enterprises’ decision on OFDI. The community of neighboring companies is also an important factor that determines the enterprises’ decision-making on OFDI. For Chinese enterprises, the research shows that the connection of export network is not only an important reason for the rapid expansion but also an essential resource and advantage of their OFDI.
Under the background of gradually bluring industrial boundaries, how to implement cross-industry innovation successfully has become the hot issue that both scholars and practitioners pay close attention to. Different from many existing studies, the research focuses on the long-term dynamic process of cross-industry innovation, adopts the logic of combination and co-creation instead of the one-way learning logic of previous studies, selects the micro-perspective of enterprise business level, and analyzes the process of Tianhong fund’s realization of leapfrog development by cross-industry innovation. With the integrated perspectives of enterprise genes and environment, multidimensional observation of Tianhong fund’s multi-stage cross-industry innovation is made. The research also constructed the dynamic process of cross-industry innovation model and summarizes the two basic types of cross-industry innovation model and their driving mechanism and feedback mechanism, enrich the cross-industry innovation research and developed the corporate gene theory.
The entrepreheurship has promoted the creation of job opportunities, and the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure, thus providing strong support for economic growth. Based on the data collected in China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) in 2017, this paper studies the impact of mobile payment on household entrepreneurial decisions and business performance. Taking into account the possible endogeneity in the model, an instrumental variable method is employed where ownership of smartphone is set as the instrumental variable. The study showed that mobile payment significantly increasing the probability of household entrepreneurship and enhancing business performance. Moreover, it plays a greater role in promoting entrepreneurship activities of households with high start-up costs and credit constraints. Mobile payment improves the probability of enterprises' innovative activities, this provides a possible explanation for the improvement of business performance. By optimizing entrepreneurial conditions, it also increases the probability of household initiative entrepreneurship. Heterogeneity analysis shows that mobile payment has a greater positive effect on households' entrepreneurship decision-making and business performance in relatively backward areas, and it significantly improves the business performance of daily consumption industry and micro-enterprises. A possible explanation is presented in the paper, as that supporting facilities in aforesaid regions are relatively lagging behind, the business scale is relatively small, resulting in relatively high cost for entrepreneurship; financial constraints also play a role. Development of mobile payment facilitates reduction, if not removing at all, at least to a noticeable degree, of inhibitions in both aspects. Based on the above analysis, the paper endeavors to put forward policy suggestions on better promotion of the “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” campaign.
How to deal with the relationship between deleveraging and promoting innovation and find out the leverage that can promote innovation and avoid debt risk is a major problem for Chinese firms. This paper analyzed the mechanism of the impact of firm leverage on firm innovation, and then constructs the evaluation system of firm innovation from three aspects, namely, innovation input, innovation output and innovation risk. Based on the fixed effect and probit model, we carried out the empirical research about what leverage is conducive to firm innovation with Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share non-financial listed companies as samples. The study shows that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the firm leverage and firm input or output, and the impact of firm leverage on the innovation risk is U-shaped. When the leverage is less than 43.01%, it can promote innovation input and output, and reduce innovation risk. However, when the leverage exceeds 43.01%, innovation risk increases with the increase of leverage. Meanwhile, compared with the short-term leverage, the long-term leverage can more effectively promote innovation output while controlling innovation risks. Compared with the bank-lending leverage, commercial-credit leverage has a limited effect on innovation output, and the innovation risk increases. Moreover, the effect of leverage on innovation is different due to the heterogeneity in the size of firm and the nature of technology, and the leverage range beneficial for firm innovation is also different among firms of different scales and industries. Therefore, we need to take various policies and measures according to the specific situations of firms to optimize the firm leverage and promote firm innovation. This study not only offers some enlightenment for the formulation of policies on structural deleveraging, but also provides some empirical evidence for the smooth implementation of the strategy of innovation-driven development under the background of deleveraging.
Tax Enforcement plays an important role in corporate governance. Existing studies have verified that mandatory tax enforcement has a restraint effect on enterprises. This paper theoretically analyzes the incentive effect of flexible tax enforcement on financing constraints of enterprises from the new perspective of flexible tax enforcement. Taking A-share listed companies over the period 2009–2016 as a sample, we use the tax-paying credit rating disclosure system to describe the flexible tax enforcement as a natural experiment and adopt the PSM-DID method to separate the net effect of flexible tax enforcement on financing constraints. The results show that after the rating results are disclosed, for enterprises with high ratings, the level of financing constraints is significantly reduced. The specific performance is that after the disclosure of the rating results, the cost of credit capital of enterprises with high ratings significantly reduces, and the credit scale significantly increases. We further reveal the mechanism of the incentive effect played by flexible tax enforcement, finding that different from mandatory tax enforcement that plays a restraint effect through information asymmetry reduction and deterrence mechanism, flexible tax enforcement exerts an incentive effect and alleviate corporate financing constraints by reducing information asymmetry and improving corporate reputation. Moreover, flexible tax enforcement can achieve a supplementary effect on mandatory tax enforcement. The conclusions of this paper not only expand the theories on the incentive effect of tax enforcement and its mechanism, but also provide more important policy implications for the reform of tax enforcement and the practice of the government to develop new ways of regulation and supervision and strengthen its credibility.
