Study Of The Effect Voluntary Certification Has On Enterprise Performance

With the speed up of global economic integration, to take the initiate position in the fierce competition and get the competitive advantages, more and more domestic enterprises turn to the differentiation strategy of product quality in order to survive and get profits, and this directly leads to the vigorous development of voluntary certification industry in recent years. However, as the increasing of the number of species and standards, the performance improvement that certification brings to enterprises starts to be influenced and restricted by a series of factors, leading to the result that the market is filled with doubts about the validity of certification. In view of this situation, this paper attempts to discuss the relationship and mechanism between corporate performance and certification from two aspects of demand and supply.The theory part of this paper consists of two aspects of demand and supply. The demand side includes three aspects of reputation premium, the spread of information and market structure, and the supply side includes three aspects of corporate governance, corporate innovation and certification costs. Among them, reputation premium, corporate governance and enterprise innovation have promoting effect on corporate performance; and the dissemination of information, the market structure and the certification cost have restrictive and blocking effect on corporate performance.The empirical part uses the method of propensity score matching (PSM), using the panel data from 2006 to 2009 of which is the first time to get the green food certification in 2007 to very the relationship and mechanism between certification and enterprise performance. The empirical results show:(1) Certification of green food has a significant promoting effect on corporate performance:certification can not only promote the enterprise market expansion, but also the total factor productivity. (2) The green food certification has an effect on enterprise performance from two aspects of demand and supply:certification affects enterprise performance through two paths of product premium and enterprise innovation; there is a negative correlation between the market competition and enterprise performance.In the end, combining the theoretical and empirical analysis, we put forward the corresponding policy recommendations:standard the behavior of certification organization; strengthen the construction of information channel; enhance consumer cognition.