| How to keep a long-term development of economy during the transformation from extensive progress to quality progress in China? Corporate innovation is the most mentioned answer according to the literature(Zhong et al.,2017;Feng et al.,2017;Wang et al.,2020).Innovation is the engine for economic development,also is the key for firms to establish and maintain competitive advantages.However,different from other investments,innovation investments are related to massive funds,high risk,long period and technical content,which means the support and supervision of stakeholders are required during firms’ innovation.Firms’ manager is the host of innovation,while the shareholders are the investors and supervisors.Therefore,their decisions will have a crucial impact on the innovation achievement.In the view of different stakeholders,R&D is necessary strategy for firms,but R&D also is a risky choice with high uncertainty.In order to reduce their uncertainty,firms’ managers,major shareholders,minority shareholders both need to make appropriate decisions on R&D in their status.Among them,information is the common starting for stakeholders to make decisions,and sufficient information can help firms’ stakeholders avoid inefficient decisions(Akerlof,1970;Stiglitz,1981).Therefore,a better information environment is often regarded as the necessary condition for different stakeholders in firms’ innovation activities.This paper investigates the spillover effects of R&D information disclosure on peer firms’ innovation activities based on the exogenous scenario.From the different view of firms’ stakeholders,we investigate the impact of peer firms’ R&D disclosure on firms’ managers’ operation,and major shareholders’ governance,and investor’evaluation.The research sample are the R&D information in the financial reports of listed firms from 2007-2020.The empirical model is the fixed-effects regression.We also have discussed the role of R&D disclosure in firms’ innovation through the heterogeneity analysis.As a summarization of our theoretical analysis and empirical test,the main research conclusions of this paper are as follows:First,in the view of manager,we find the peer firms’ R&D disclosure can promote firm’s manager to increase R&D investment,and improve firm’s patent applications and grants.Besides,we also find the amount of all kinds of patents are increased,which means manager is not engaging strategic innovation.Further research shows the more optimistic disclosure leads to more innovation investment and patents,indicating that R&D disclosure will bring competitive pressure to managers which promote their innovation intention.Besides,R&D disclosure is more helpful to firms rely imitation,indicating that R&D disclosure can improve the information communication.The heterogeneity tests find that peer firms’ R&D disclosure has a more positive impact on equity financing relied or high-tech firms,which shows the benefits from the innovation supports.These research results have verified the help and influence of R&D disclosure on firms’ innovation,which can provide theoretical reference and relevant experience for managers exploring how to effectively stimulate and promote firms’ innovation inputs and outputs.Second,in view of major shareholders,we find peer firms’ R&D disclosure can promote shareholders to increase the compensation paid to managers,and lower the performance evaluation of the compensation,which can reduce managers’ concerns of performance.The results also show an increase of other kinds of incentives,which provides managers a fault-tolerant condition.Besides,the results show that the costs of principal-agent are reduced fairly,indicates the positive effects of peer disclosure.Further we find the more optimistic disclosure leads to more fault-tolerant condition,shows the competitive pressure effect on shareholders’ decisions.The heterogeneity tests find that peer disclosure has a stronger spillover effect on SOEs and low R&D investment firms,verified the help of peer disclosure on information communication.These research results proved that R&D disclosure is effective to decisions making,and is referential for shareholders to construct managers’ compensation contract.Thirdly,in view of minority shareholders,we find peer firms’ R&D disclosure can promote investors to improve the valuation of firms’ earnings,which can increase the support of capital market on firms’ innovation.We also find a more positive impact on the firms have more R&D investments,indicating that R&D disclosure can explain the earnings contribution of R&D activities.Besides,the tests of firms’ external information environment show that peer disclosure can not only improve firms’ information transparency,but also can increase the intention of investors to invest in the firms,which reveals that R&D disclosure can provide firms’ investors with a private information sharing environment.Further study shows that the peer disclosure with more readability can lead to a higher valuation of firms’ earnings in capital market,further verifying the spillover effect of peer firms’ R&D disclosure on private information.The heterogeneity study finds that peer firms’ R&D disclosure has a stronger impact on high-tech and competitive firms.These research results have verified the help and influence of peer firms’ R&D disclosure on investors’ valuation,and can provide relevant policy basis for guiding capital market funds flow to the corporate innovation.Based on the research contents and conclusions,this paper may have some contributions as following four aspects.1)Taking use of the exogenous research scenario of the spillover effects of the peer firms’ R&D disclosure,we have verified that the textual information can be effective on firms’ management and governance activities.2)This paper tries to measure the features of Chinese textual information by the application of text analysis method,which can extend the literature of big data analysis in accounting research field,and expect to provide some experience for reference for further research.3)Based on the new economic stage in China that encourages innovation,we investigate the spillover effects of the peer firms’ R&D disclosure on managers,major shareholders and investors.These results can enrich the relationship between information disclosure and corporate innovation.4)We also explore the mechanisms how the peer firms’ R&D disclosure have effects on firms’ stakeholders’ decision-making.These results can provide firms in different conditions with relevant evidence to better conduct their R&D activities,and also can provide policy departments with possible solutions to construct a better R&D environment by encouraging industry information disclosure. |
