A Study On The Firm Perception Of Uncertainty And R&D Investment

China’s economy is currently at a critical stage of transition from high-speed development to high-quality development.In the macroeconomic context of the unprecedented change in a century,it is inevitable that the state will formulate,introduce and adjust economic policies to intervene in economic development.However,due to the information asymmetry between economic policy makers and micro market players,enterprises cannot accurately predict whether,when and how the government will change the current economic policies,which leads to frequent policy adjustments that can bring great uncertainty to enterprises,i.e.economic policy uncertainty.Existing theoretical and empirical research results show that uncertainty is an important factor affecting corporate investment decisions.Based on the existing research,we uses the text mining method and takes the annual reports disclosed by listed companies as the basic text analysis corpus to construct the heterogeneous economic policy uncertainty perception indicators at the enterprise level.After completing this time-consuming basic work,it further adopts a variety of validity verification schemes to test the effectiveness of the indicators.To ensure that the constructed indicators can effectively capture the perceived degree of economic policy uncertainty of enterprises.On the basis of fully ensuring the validity of the index,taking China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2020 as the research sample,based on the heterogeneous enterprises’ economic policy uncertainty perception index,this paper empirically tests whether and how the enterprises’ economic policy uncertainty perception affects their R&D investment.Further,according to the nature of enterprise ownership,market competition and financial constraints,the heterogeneity analysis and moderating effect analysis machine are carried out.The empirical results show that when the perception of economic policy uncertainty increases,enterprises tend to postpone R&D investment due to the cautious attitude of uncertainty,which has a negative inhibitory effect on R&D investment.The results show that the above inhibitory effect is more obvious in non-state-owned enterprises,and is positively moderated by market competition and negatively moderated by financing constraints.This paper innovatively uses the text mining method to construct the perception index of enterprises’ economic policy uncertainty,theoretically deduces how enterprises’ economic policy uncertainty affects their R&D investment,and empirically tests the impact of economic policy uncertainty on enterprises’ R&D investment from the perspective of enterprises’ perception,which not only enriches the research tool of economic policy uncertainty,but also enriches the research tool of economic policy uncertainty.It also expands the research on the microeconomic effect of economic policy uncertainty on the R&D investment decision of enterprises,which can provide theoretical basis and useful practical reference for the implementation of innovation-driven strategy from the micro level.