Research On Peer Effects In Innovation Of Listed Firms

Innovation is not only the main source of firm competitiveness,but also an important driving force of economic development.Through innovation activities,firms can improve production efficiency,activate market transactions,and finally promote economic development.However,innovation activities have the characteristics of high investment,high risk and high uncertainty.Enterprises often face great challenges when making innovation decisions.Therefore,the importance and complexity of corporate innovation activities make the topic of innovation become a hot research field in scholars and entrepreneurs.The existing literatures pay less attention to the interaction between different firms.This thesis makes an in-depth study on corporate innovation behavior from the perspective of the peer effects.From the perspective of peer effects,based on the financial and innovative data of China’s A-share listed firms from 2004 to 2018,this thesis mainly focuses on the peer effects of industry innovation performance,as well as examining the mediating mechanisms and economic consequences.The empirical analysis is as follows:Firstly,the number of patent applications represents the corporate innovation performance,and the number of patent citations represents the quality of corporate innovation.This thesis studies the existence of the peer effects of innovation of listed firms in same industry.The empirical results show that the peer effects of listed firms’ innovation exists significantly in the Chinese market,that is,the innovation activities of firms will be significantly affected by the innovation activities of other enterprises in same industry.By changing the industry classification standard,placebo test and controlling co-movement of R&D investment,the robustness test is found that the baseline result is still robustness.Moreover,from the perspective of market competition,this thesis finds that the peer effects in innovation promotes corporate innovation performance by increasing the degree of industry competition.Secondly,based on the perspective of “performance pressure” and “information transmission”,this thesis studies the impact of analysts’ attention and investors’ attention on the peer effects of innovation.The empirical results show that the higher the attention of analysts and investors,the better the innovation performance of enterprises.The attention is more positive to the peer effects of innovation behavior in the same industry.In order to solve the possible endogenous problems,this thesis selects the net analysts’ attention and investors’ attention excluding the characteristic factors such as enterprise scale and profit as alternative variables to test.The results show that the above conclusions are still significantly solid.Furthermore,the study found that the firm size,ownership,profitability will have an important impact on the industry peer effects of corporate innovation.The results show that the industry peer effects of innovation is stronger in small market value,low profit and non-state-owned enterprises.Finally,this thesis further proves that the industry peer effects of innovation can have a positive impact on firm performance,which shows that the industry peer effects of corporate innovation achieves the purpose of maintaining competitive advantage and market share.The basic conclusions obtained in this thesis are enlightening for improving the innovation motivation of enterprises,creating a good innovation atmosphere,and promoting the construction of creative country.