The Research On The Influence Of The Ratio Of The Independent Directors On Enterprise R&D Investment

Innovation and entrepreneurship is one of the important themes of China's 13 th five-year plan,which elaborates China's planning on innovation and entrepreneurship.This shows that China attaches great importance to innovation and entrepreneurship.As an enterprise,its innovation and R&D capability has always been regarded as the core competitiveness of its development and the core driving force for the improvement of a country's innovation level.Based on the consideration of corporate governance,research on independent directors and enterprise R&D investment has always been a hot topic.Enterprise's R&D activities often require a longer cycle,and the enterprise often require larger investment in R&D,coupled with the uncertainty of the future research and development of the market,and product returns of uncertainty factors,such as enterprise management often would not cost too much in terms of R&D manpower,financial and material resources,enterprise's management is more likely to choose the low risk and high returns,return cycle shorter some projects,this makes the enterprise's management is a short-term behavior,often not conducive to the long-term development of enterprises in the future.Based on this,this paper argues that the independent directors as a corporate board of directors of the independent third party supervision and management of the enterprise,can make full use of the own professional as well as in the related resources and experience,in their major area of R&D activities of the enterprise to provide more professional guidance and advice,to the enterprise in the aspect of R&D is not scientific,the unreasonable decisions can provide the corresponding supervision and reformed.Therefore,with the reasonable increase of the proportion of independent directors in an enterprise,the influence of independent directors on the R&D investment of the enterprise will also increase.In this paper,11112 pieces of data from 2011 to 2017 and 2015 a-share listed companies were selected as samples to study the influence of proportion of independent directors on enterprise R&D investment through panel regression model.The results show that the proportion of independent directors is positively correlated with the R&D investment.However,this relationship changes with the characteristics of enterprises.This paper classifies enterprises according to the proportion of cash flow in total assets,asset-liability ratio and state-owned enterprises and private enterprises,and finds that R&D investment of a company with sufficientcash flow and high financial leverage ratio of independent directors has a significant promoting effect.On the contrary,the ratio of independent directors to low cash flow to total assets and the ratio of low asset-liability ratio did not significantly promote the R&D investment of the company.Meanwhile,the positive effect of proportion of independent directors on enterprise R&D investment is only effective for private enterprises,while the relationship between proportion of independent directors in state-owned enterprises and enterprise R&D investment is not significant.Finally,according to relevant conclusions,relevant policy Suggestions are put forward to further improve the corporate governance level and increase the investment in R&D.