| As a long-term incentive mechanism to make the interests of enterprise managers and shareholders converge,equity incentive has been widely concerned by the practical and theoretical circles since establishment.The promulgation of relevant laws and regulations of "Measures for the Management on Equity Incentive of Listed Companies" not only improves the governance and restraint mechanism of equity incentive,but also promotes the effective promotion of their implementation.As a result,the academic research focus on equity incentive gradually shifted from the effectiveness of equity incentive itself to the impact of equity incentive on corporate performance,but there are still insufficient studies on the transmission mechanism and impact path between equity incentive and corporate performance.This paper puts equity incentive,life cycle,firm performance and agency cost into a complete analytical framework,then combines principal-agent theory,stakeholder theory,information asymmetry theory and life cycle theory.It uses the public data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2016 to 2020 as sample sources to empirically explore the relationship between equity incentive and corporate performance,whether there is an intermediary effect of agency cost in the path,and whether there is a threshold effect in the impact of equity incentive on corporate performance in different life cycle stages.The results show that :(1)there is a significant positive correlation between corporate performance and equity incentive.(2)Based on the empirical analysis of the established mediating effect model of equity incentive,agency cost and corporate performance,the agency cost plays an intermediary role in the path of equity incentive and corporate performance,that is,equity incentive can indirectly promote the improvement of corporate performance by reducing agency cost.(3)The threshold effect exists in the growth and maturity period of enterprises;compared with the growing companies,the implementation of equity incentive for mature companies is more conducive to the improvement of corporate performance. |
