| During the 14 th Five-Year Plan period,accelerating technological innovation and institutional reform remains the key for promoting high-quality economic development.Over the past decade,China have implemented a series of fiscal,financial,and industrial policies to encourage R&D investment and improve the level of economic innovation and development.In 2021,the R&D investment amount of non-financial listed companies has reached 1.31 trillion yuan,achieved year-on-year growth of 25.53%,and accounted for47.02% of the total R&D investment of enterprises in China,playing a leading role in innovation and development.Digital transformation is one of the important achievements of science and technology innovation.With representative technology of big data,block chain,cloud computing,and artificial intelligence,the new generation of information and communication technologies alleviate the information asymmetry problem,reduces the transaction cost,broaden the financing channels,and optimized the information collection and analysis of the R&D investment decision.In the long time,digital transformation of firms has a multiplier effect on high quality and economic development.However,it may only enhance the imitative peer effect in the short term due to the integration cost.The imitation behavior only increases the “quantity” of innovation but does not significantly improve the “quality” of innovation.Based on the phenomenon of firms’ imitative innovation in the age of digital transformation,this paper constructed the framework to analyze the peer effect of firms’ R&D investment and its impact on the economy from the perspective of digital transformation and explored the impact of the digital transformation.Studies in the field of peer effect and innovation respectively focus on demonstrating the existence of peer effect in the financial field and the impact of imitative innovation on high-quality economic development,but few research combines the two to explore the economic consequence of peer effect.Theoretical research in the field of digital economy shows that although digital transformation has a multiplier effect on the economy in the long term,it is limited by the integration cost in the short term,which only induces the imitative peer effect of enterprises but cannot substantially promote technological progress.This paper constructs an analytical framework of the peer effect of firms’ R&D investment and its economic consequences from the perspective of digital transformation.Listed companies on Shanghai and Shenzhen Exchanges from 2007-2020 are chosen as initial samples.Then,we select digitalized companies according to whether they contain keywords of digital transformation in their annual reports.In the empirical study,we firstly use classical peer effect model and system-GMM method to examine the existence of peer effect of R&D investment of digitalized firms.Then,we take total factor productivity(TFP)calculated by data envelopment analysis(DEA)as the proxy variable of economic consequence to explore the impact of R&D investment peer effect on the economy.Finally,the initial samples are divided into digitalized companies and nondigitalized companies according to the keywords of digital transformation in the annual report.Propensity score matching(PSM)method is applied to analyze the impact of digital transformation on the peer effect of R&D investment.We further explore it from digital technology application level,digital intelligence technology application and digital economy development stage.Our results are as follows.Firstly,there is significant peer effect in one firm’s R&D investment.Secondly,R&D investment improves firms’ TFP,but the imitative peer effect in R&D investment weakens it.Thirdly,Digital transformation strengthens the peer effect of R&D investment.The peer effect of R&D investment of listed digitalized companies is stronger than then listed non-digitalized companies.Finally,further empirical research shows that all the degree of application of digital technology,the application of big data and artificial intelligence,and the stage of digital economy development have positive impact on the peer effect,of which the influence of the application of digital technology is the greatest.The possible contributions of this paper are as follows.First,we contribute the analysis framework of peer effect and its impact on the economy from the perspective of digital transformation.Second,we examine the impact of digital transformation on the peer effect and further explore it from the perspective of the degree of application of digital transformation,the application of big data and artificial intelligence technology,and the stage of development of digital transformation.Third,listed digitalized companies are chosen and system-GMM method is applied in the research specification to avoid the particularity of Chinese capital market and remove the endogeneity. |
