Financial Slack,Executive Team Hetrtogeneity And R&D Investment

Nowadays,China’s economy is changing from rapid development to high-quality development.Under the new historical conditions,innovation is the core of national economic development.As the micro main body to promote high-quality economic development,enterprises must obtain competitive advantage and stabilize their market position through innovation.As an important representative of China’s innovation field,high-tech enterprises need to further improve their innovation ability and increase their R&D investment,so as to improve innovation performance and enable enterprises to achieve long-term development.As an important process of enterprise innovation,R&D investment is very critical to the improvement of independent innovation ability.However,due to the high risk and long time-consuming characteristics of R&D investment,it is relatively difficult for enterprises to use external resources.Whether financial slack,as an internal retained resource of enterprises,can support R&D investment has attracted attention.As for financial slack,how to effectively use these resources and make operational and strategic decisions by the enterprise management will directly affect the innovative development of the company.At the same time,as the main decision-maker and leader of the enterprise to carry out innovative R&D activities,the importance of the enterprise management for the enterprise’s R&D investment is self-evident.The heterogeneity of senior management team means that senior managers may have differences in age,education,professional background,gender,etc.,which will affect the strategic decision-making of the enterprise,and then have a certain impact on the relationship between financial slack and R&D investment.Therefore,starting from the internal financial slack of the company,this paper selects China’s A-share high-tech enterprises from 2010 to 2019 for empirical analysis,examines the relationship between the company’s financial slack and R&D investment,and discusses the regulatory role of senior management team heterogeneity.The results show that:(1)Financial redundancy can significantly promote the R&D investment of enterprises.(2)The age heterogeneity and gender heterogeneity of senior management team have a negative impact on the company’s financial slack and R&D investment;The heterogeneity of educational background has a positive impact on financial slack and R&D investment;The heterogeneity of occupational background has no significant effect on the relationship between them.(3)Further through the enterprise heterogeneity test,it is found that the relationship between financial slack and R&D investment is more significant in high-tech enterprises with recession,high degree of marketization,high financing constraints and low equity concentration.The research conclusion affirms the positive role of financial slack and provides an effective reference for enterprise innovation and development and government management.