Can Subsidiary Autonomy Improve Enterprise Risk-taking Level?

The equality of risk and return is the law of enterprise management.But the fact shows that listed subsidiaries always avoid investment opportunities with positive NPV but high risk,which is contrary to the development goal of value maximization.How to improve the risk-taking level of subsidiaries is a difficult problem to be solved urgently in the management field.In the context of an extremely turbulent market environment,in order to seize the fleeting opportunities,subsidiaries must master autonomy.Autonomy can improve the embeddedness of subsidiaries in enterprise networks,and it can also generate power to motivate managers.Therefore,this thesis focuses on the relationship between subsidiary autonomy and enterprise risk-taking level,and takes organizational redundancy into consideration.The significance of this study lies in:(1)points out a new way for enterprises to improve their own risk-taking level,and provides a new entry point for the governance practice of parent-subsidiary companies;(2)enriches the research on contextual factors affecting subsidiary autonomy,and provides reference for enterprises to correctly handle organizational redundancy;(3)opens the black box between subsidiary autonomy and risk-taking level,which provides a new explanation for the mechanism between them;(4)reveals the economic consequences brought by enterprises of different natures to further improve the level of risk-taking,and provides a theoretical basis for promoting the mixed reform of state-owned enterprises.The main contents of this thesis are as follows:The first is whether the autonomy of listed subsidiaries can improve the level of enterprise risk-taking.On this basis,the influence of the autonomy of state-owned and non-state-owned subsidiaries on enterprise risk-taking level is studied by grouping the enterprise nature as a heterogeneous variable.Secondly,this thesis explores the moderating effect of different structures and different levels of redundant resources on the relationship between subsidiary autonomy and enterprise risk-taking level.Thirdly,this thesis introduces intermediary variables to study whether subsidiary autonomy can promote the improvement of enterprise risk-taking through the enhancement of debt financing ability.Fourthly,in order to explore whether the improvement of risk-taking level can bring good economic consequences to the company,this thesis also analyzes the relationship between risk-taking level and firm value,and further tests the impact of risk-taking level of state-owned and non-state-owned subsidiaries on firm value on this basis.Based on the above contents,this thesis does an empirical analysis on the relevant data of listed subsidiaries in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2007 to 2020,and draws the following conclusions:(1)subsidiary autonomy positively affects enterprise risk-taking level,and the positive relationship between the autonomy of non-state-owned subsidiaries and risk-taking level is stronger than that of state-owned subsidiaries;(2)the richer the absorbed and unabsorbed redundancy,the higher the overall redundancy level,and the better the promotion of subsidiary autonomy to risk-taking level;(3)debt financing ability plays an intermediary role between subsidiary autonomy and enterprise risk-taking level;(4)improving enterprise risk-taking level has a positive impact on firm value.After further distinguishing the nature of enterprises,it is found that this positive relationship is stronger in non-state-owned enterprises.The innovations of this thesis are as follows:firstly,it enriches and expands the research content of subsidiary autonomy,and enriches the research of subsidiary autonomy in the field of corporate governance;Secondly,it puts forward and verifies a new way to encourage enterprises to improve the level of risk-taking under the framework of parent-subsidiary companies,that is,to improve the autonomy of subsidiaries;Thirdly,reveals and explores the influence of unabsorbed redundancy and absorbed redundancy on the relationship between subsidiary autonomy and risk-taking level,opens the"black box" between the autonomy of subsidiaries and the level of enterprise risk-taking,which makes up for the lack of mechanism research between the two.