Top Management Team Heterogeneity,Pay Gap And R&D Investment

With the increasingly fierce market competition and the restriction of resources,enterprises realize the importance of innovation gradually.Using R&D investment to improve the performance of enterprises in order to gain favorable competitive position has become the guarantee for enterprises to achieve long-term development.After more than 20 years of development,innovation ability of listed enterprises in our country get rapid ascension.And the amount of R&D investment activities has risen significantly.But compared with developed countries in the world,there are still many problems in the R&D investment activities in China,such as the R&D level is still low and is out-off-balance.Therefore,it is necessary to further explore the factors which affect R&D investment.In the numerous factors which affect enterprise R&D investment decision,managers characteristics has always been the focus of scholars both at home and abroad.But throughout the existing literature in this field,most of the research are from the perspective of managers homogeneity and ignore the influence of heterogeneity on enterprise strategic decision.There is no doubt that this is incompatible with reality.In reality,the scale of top management team is gradually expanding,and the differences among team members in age,tenure,education level and professional background are becoming more and more obvious.So the research on the role of TMT heterogeneity in R&D investment has more practical significance.At the same time,top management team members,as managers of enterprises,are deeply influenced by principal-agent relationship.As a kind of incentive mechanism,the pay gap will be a problem worth exploring in terms of how to influence R&D investment decision,and whether it will influence the relationship between TMT heterogeneity and R&D investment.Based on what discussed above,using the manufacturing and information technology listed companies which disclosed the R&D investment data from 2007 to 2015 as samples,utilize multiple regression analysis to test how TMT heterogeneity and pay gap influence the R&D investment respectively and moderating effect of pay gap.First of all,this paper selects age,tenure,education level and career background these four representative variables of heterogeneity.According to their different nature,they are divided into relation oriented heterogeneity and task oriented heterogeneity,and then,based on principal-agent conflict and rational economic man hypothesis,the influence of four heterogeneous representative variables on R&D investment is analyzed.Secondly,based on the tournament theory,taking into account the incentive effect of the pay gap under the principal-agent situation,to analyze the impact of the pay gap on R&D investment.Finally,because of the process of TMT heterogeneity affecting R&D investment is also disturbed by the problem of principal agent,and the pay gap,as an incentive mechanism,can effectively alleviate the conflict between principal and agent.So this paper explores the moderating role of pay gap between TMT heterogeneity and R&D investment.Study found that:(1)Age heterogeneity is related to the R&D investment negatively,while tenure heterogeneity and education level heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity are positively related to the R&D investment;(2)Pay gap within executive team and enterprise R&D investment is positively related;(3)The pay gap can significantly alleviate the negative effect of TMT age heterogeneity on the R&D investment and can significantly enhance the positive impact of TMT tenure heterogeneity,education level heterogeneity,professional background heterogeneity on the R&D investment.This article is divided into six parts.In the first part,with the introduction to enterprises' R&D status at home and abroad as a starting point,it comes up with the research topic and research significance,and proposes the research targets and contents,at the same time,putting forward research innovations in the paper;The second part is literature review,which mainly summarizes and evaluates the research results of related fields at home and abroad,so as to inspire further research on the basis of existing research;The third part is the theory analysis and the research hypothesis,this part of the paper defines the important concepts involved first of all,then expounds the theoretical basis of the study and combines the content of this study to make assumptions;The fourth chapter is research design.It is introducing how to measure the key variables in the paper and construct the corresponding models on the basis of three hypothesizes.And then select data from the financial statements of listed companies and determine research samples;Chapter five is the empirical analysis,including analysis of the multivariate regression of the research sample and the robustness test;The sixth chapter are research conclusions and suggestions.Through the previous theoretical analysis and empirical test,this part summarizes the research conclusions,and puts forward relevant suggestions for enterprise managers,and then expounds the limitations of this paper and the future direction of exploration.