Marine Culture And Private Enterprise Innovation

Corporate innovation behavior studies focus mostly on formal institutions,and there are fewer studies with a cultural perspective.This paper attempts to break through the framework of maritime culture literature and history research and analyze the cultural factors affecting corporate innovation.This study selects the innovation data of Chinese private listed enterprises from 2009 to 2017,based on the natural connection between Mazu beliefs,which is the national intangible cultural heritage,and maritime culture,and uses the distribution density of Mazu temples manually collated as a proxy variable to measure the intensity of maritime culture,based on geographical proximity matching to derive the private listed The degree to which private listed enterprises are influenced by maritime culture is determined based on geographical proximity matching,and Stata software and Tobit regression analysis are used to explore the influence of maritime culture on private enterprises’ innovation behavior and its mechanisms.It was found that maritime culture has a significant positive contribution to private enterprise innovation,i.e.,the stronger the maritime culture in the location of the private enterprise,the more innovation output and the more efficient the innovation input and creation.Further treatments using the instrumental variables approach,changing the dependent variable measure and sample size,using lagged variables,controlling for regional and managerial level factors,and placebo tests still support the robustness of the results.Based on agency theory and risk theory,the study verified that maritime culture affects corporate innovation through two pathways: mitigating agency conflict and reducing managers’ risk preferences.The study also finds that formal institutions and other cultures such as Buddhism and Taoism will weaken the positive effect of marine culture on corporate innovation.This paper reveals the inner logic of the influence of marine culture on private enterprise innovation,enriches the literature on the topics of "marine culture" and "culture and corporate decision making",and provides insights to promote the dissemination of marine culture and enhance national marine awareness in the new era.