| Excessive expansion of finance away from the real world will hinder the sound development of the real economy.At present,China is in an important strategic transition period from high-speed development to high-quality development,and enterprises,as important cells of the economy,have shown a more obvious phenomenon of "virtual reality divergence".Due to the current downward pressure on the domestic economy and lower profit margins in the real economy,it is of profound practical significance to curb the profit-seeking financialization of real enterprises,guide finance to better serve the real and promote the virtuous cycle of finance and the real.As an important part of information disclosure on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange,institutional investors’ site visit activities can have a positive external governance effect.The site visit activities of institutional investors can dig into the private information of enterprises,and through the information spillover effect,other investors in the capital market can access the research information,reducing the information asymmetry inside and outside the company and between different investors.On this basis,various market players can effectively monitor enterprises and curb the opportunistic behaviour of corporate insiders.Can on-site research by institutional investors curb corporate financialization? Are different financial assets of different maturities allocated for different motives and thus have different effects? Are there differences in the impact of site visit on financial assets of different maturities? Is there a difference in the impact of site visit on financialization given the heterogeneity of firms and the heterogeneity of institutional investors? Each of these questions is discussed in this paper.This paper conducts an empirical study on the field research of institutional investors and corporate financialization by using listed companies in Shenzhen main board A-share market as research samples during 2013-2021.Firstly,we examine the relationship between whether institutional investors conduct research,the number of research,the number of research and corporate financialization.Secondly,we divide the financial assets into long-term financial assets with the motive of "investment substitution" and short-term financial assets with the motive of "reservoir",and examine the relationship between institutional research and longterm and short-term financial assets respectively.Thirdly,we test whether the relationship between the two is different in the case of heterogeneity in the nature of corporate ownership and institutional investors.Fourth,2 paths of action are proposed and tested,namely,the information content of share price and the level of internal corporate governance.Finally,corporate technological innovation is introduced to test the motives of corporate financialization,and the number of institutional research questions is constructed to further enrich the study between institutional investors’ field research and corporate financialization.The empirical results show that:(1)institutional investors’ site visit plays a governance role in the "de-financialization" of non-financial enterprises,and can significantly reduce the level of financialization of enterprises;(2)Institutional investors have a suppressive effect on both long-term and short-term financial assets,with long-term financial assets showing an "investment substitution" effect and short-term financial assets not showing a "reservoir" effect;(3)The inhibiting effect of field research by institutional investors on financialization is more pronounced among non-state enterprises;(4)Field research by sellers and buyers differs significantly in terms of the number of researchers,with more research by sellers’ institutions reducing the level of corporate financialization.The findings of this paper help to understand more comprehensively the governance role played by investors’ field research and provide reference for regulators to continuously regulate institutional investors’ field research to curb the "de-realization" of enterprises. |
