A Research On The Relation Of The Pyramid Holding Structure And R&D Investment In State-owned Enterprises

Under the pyramid holding structure,due to the existence of intermediate layers,the actual controllers of the enterprises no longer directly participate in the operation and management of the enterprise,and give more management rights to managers,which reduce the political interference in the operation of the enterprise.However,with the control chain lengthening,the information asymmetry increases,and the supervision from the actual controller decreases,resulting in more agency costs.In order to explore how the reduce of political intervention and the increase of agency costs under the pyramid holding structure affect the R&D investment,the paper uses the data from 2007 to 2015 as a sample to conduct a research about the influence of the control chain layers of state-owned enterprises on the R&D investment.Through analysis,the paper finds that,with the control chain lengthening,the agency cost effect of local state-owned enterprises increases significantly,showing a significant reduction of R&D investment,but the correlation is not obvious for central enterprises;for the group the number of control layers is greater than the median,the lengthening of control chains significantly inhibits the R&D investment of the central enterprises and local state-owned enterprises,showing stronger agent cost effect.Further,the paper examines the groups divided according to the median of the agency cost.The empirical results show that the restraint effect of the lengthening of control chains on R&D investment of local state-owned enterprises is only significant when the current agency cost is low.Finally,considering the implementation of the equity incentive for executives of state-owned enterprises,the paper finds that the implementation of the equity incentive can significantly alleviates agency cost problems and weakens the negative impact of the increase of control layers on R&D investment.The paper is based on the background of separating the SOEs from governments to study the impact of the pyramid holding structure of SOEs on the R&D investment.The paper expects to provide a supplementation study for the economic consequences of the pyramid holding structure of SOEs and to give some references for the reform of SOEs.