| Since globalization,informatization and networking accelerated the openness and liquidity of international capital,outward foreign direct investment(OFDI)has become an important means for companies to allocate capital in the global market.As of December 2018,China has established 43,000 overseas companies worldwide,with investment covering more than 80%of countries or regions in the globe.The scale of OFDI has increased from US$26.51 billion in 2007 to US$143.04 billion in 2018,with an average annual growth rate of 16.6%.Meanwhile,the global economy has been undergoing in-depth adjustment.Governments of various countries have introduced a number of economic policies to stimulate economic recovery,but they have also increased the uncertainty of global economic policies,which has had an important impact on the behavior of corporate cross-border capital allocation.From a theoretical point of view,the research on macroeconomic policies and micro-firm behaviors has mainly explored the impact of economic policy uncertainty on corporate domestic investment under closed economic conditions,while rarely considered the impact of economic policy uncertainty on corporate cross-border capital allocation.Different from domestic investment,companies need to consider both domestic and international economic policy uncertainty when making cross-border investments.When domestic and international macro environments changes differently,the perception of the two types of economic policy uncertainty may be different,which will have a heterogeneous impact on behavior of corporate cross-border capital allocation.In addition,the economic policies of different regions and industries within the same country are also different,and so are the economic policy uncertainty faced by companies.More importantly,there are various ways in which companies form their economic policy expectations.Even if companies face exactly the same policy environment,their perception of uncertainty is difficult to be uniform.However,when measuring economic policy uncertainty,existing studies have assumed that all companies have a homogeneous perception of economic policy uncertainty and have not distinguished the differences in the perception of economic policy uncertainty of individual companies.Accordingly,this paper attempts to extract two types of indicators based on the annual reports of listed companies through text mining methods to measure the degree of individual companies' perception of domestic and international economic policy uncertainty.Then it explores the impact of the perception of economic policy uncertainty on the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation,and examines the economic consequences of this impact from the perspective of capital allocation efficiency.This paper enriches the theoretical results of macroeconomic policies and micro-firm behaviors,and provides reference for decision-making of relevant government departments.This paper includes six chapters.In Chapter I,it firstly introduces the research background and significance in detail,and then defines the main concepts,finally depicts the research ideas and the technical route.The second chapter describes the main theoretical basis of the paper,summarizes the related research on the uncertainty of economic policy,the decision-making and efficiency of corporate cross-border capital allocation,and analyzes the possible problems in the existing research.Chapter III is the basic research content of the paper.Using text mining methods,two types of indicators are extracted from the annual report texts disclosed by listed companies to measure the perception of domestic and international economic policy uncertainty.On the basis of previous chapters,Chapter ? firstly examines the impact of the perception of economic policy uncertainty on the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation from multiple dimensions such as whether to choose OFDI,the breadth of OFDI,the speed of OFDI,and the types of OFDI.Secondly,it further analyzes the difference of the impact of the perception of economic policy uncertainty on the decision-making of corporate crossborder capital allocation under different property rights.Thirdly,from the perspectives of regional institutional environment,investment irreversibility,manager incentives,financing constraints,it explores the internal mechanism through which the perception of economic policy uncertainty affects the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation.Lastly,it tests the policy effect of the "Belt and Road" initiative on the relationship between the perception of economic policy uncertainty and the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation.The fifth chapter examines the economic consequences of the perception of economic policy uncertainty affecting the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation from the perspective of capital allocation efficiency,and explores the mechanism through which the perception of economic policy uncertainty affects the efficiency of corporate capital allocation.The last chapter summarizes the conclusions,innovations and prospects of the paper.The main achievements of the paper are as follows:First of all,according to the general process of text mining,this paper designs five steps including text collection,text preprocessing,custom vocabulary construction,uncertainty index measurement,and validity test to construct an company-level economic policy uncertainty perception index.In the construction of the custom vocabulary,we uses the words of"uncertainty" and "economic policy" provided by existing research as the basic vocabularies,and expands them with Word2Vec models to construct three key word lists of "uncertainty","domestic economic policy",and "international economic policy",which lay an important foundation for follow-up research.In validity test,it is found that after excluding both of the regional and industry-level differences,there are still company-level differences in the perception of economic policy uncertainty,indicating that it is necessary to construct the individual companies'perception indicators of economic policy uncertainty.In addition,we also analyzes the perception of economic policy uncertainty of different companies grouped by property rights,industry,region,and sources of uncertainty respectively.We find that:(1)The degree of the perception of domestic economic policy uncertainty is higher than that of international economic policy uncertainty,and compared with non-state-owned companies,state-owned companies have higher degrees of the perception of both domestic and international economic policy uncertainty.But there is no significant difference between central state-owned companies and local state-owned companies.(2)Companies in different industries have various degrees of the perception of both domestic and international economic policy uncertainty.Compared with other companies,companies in industries such as real estate,scientific research,technical service,and construction have a higher degree of the perception of domestic economic policy uncertainty,while companies in industries such as mining,repair,transportation,warehousing,postal,and other service have a higher degree of the perception of international economic policy uncertainty.(3)Companies in different regions also have various degrees of the perception of both domestic and international economic policy uncertainty.Companies located at central and western provinces of China such as Inner Mongolia,Tibet,Gansu,and Shanxi have a higher degree of the perception of domestic economic policy uncertainty than companies located at eastern provinces,while companies located at eastern provinces such as Jiangsu,Shandong,Fujian,and Shanghai have a higher degree of the perception of international economic policy uncertainty than companies located at central and western provinces.Moreover,these differences are consistent with the differences in the level of marketization of the regions where companies are located.The higher the level of the marketization of the regions where companies are located,the higher the degree of the perception of international economic policy uncertainty,but the lower the degree of the perception of domestic economic policy uncertainty.(4)Different sources of the perception of economic policy uncertainty also differ in their contribution to the interpretation of corporate cross-border capital allocation behavior.Among them,the uncertainty from both the international and domestic levels contributes only 2.44%-16.34%to the interpretation of corporate cross-border capital allocation behavior,and the interpretation contribution from the industry-level uncertainty is 12.57%to 54.21%.The explanation contribution of its own uncertainty reaches 36.65%?83.06%,which further illustrates the necessity of constructing firm-level economic policy uncertainty perception indicators.Secondly,based on the theories of system escape,real option,risk aversion,and financing cost,this paper empirically examines the impact of the perception of both domestic and international economic policy uncertainty on the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation.We find that:(1)The two types of perception of economic policy uncertainty have different impacts on the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation.When the degree of the perception of domestic(international)economic policy uncertainty increases(decreases),the company is more(less)likely to make cross-border capital allocation decisions.That is,the probability of OFDI is greater(smaller),the scope of OFDI is wider(narrower),the speed of OFDI is faster(slower),and the degree of diversification of OFDI is higher(lower).(2)Compared with state-owned compnies,the perception of both domestic and international economic policy uncertainty has a greater impact on the behavior of non-stateowned compnies' cross-border capital allocation.When perceiving an increase in domestic(international)economic policy uncertainty,non-state-owned compnies are more(less)inclined to make decisions of cross-border capital allocation than state-owned compnies.(3)Factors such as regional institutional environment,investment irreversibility,manager incentives,and financing constraints play an important role in regulating the relationship between the perception of economic policy uncertainty and the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation.The better the quality of the institutional environment in the region where the company is located,the greater the degree of investment irreversibility,the greater the intensity of manager incentives,or the greater the degree of financing constraints,the weaker the tendency of the company to make decisions of cross-border capital allocation when the degree of the perception of domestic economic policy uncertainty increases,but the stronger the tendency of the company not to make decisions of cross-border capital allocation when the degree of the perception of international economic policy uncertainty increases.(4)The "Belt and Road" initiative has exerted a significant policy effect on the relationship between the perception of economic policy uncertainty and the decision-making of corporate cross-border capital allocation.After the "Belt and Road" initiative was put forward,when companies perceive an increase of domestic economic policy uncertainty,their tendency to make crossborder capital allocation decisions will also increase.But when companies perceive an increase of international economic policy uncertainty,their tendency not to make cross-border capital allocation decisions will weaken.Finally,this paper further examines the economic consequences of the perception of economic policy uncertainty affecting corporate cross-border capital allocation decisions from the perspective of efficiency.We use two methods to measure the efficiency of corporate capital allocation,one is the sensitivity of investment to investment opportunities,and the other is the degree of deviation of actual investment from expected investment.We find that:(1)No matter which method we use to measure the efficiency of corporate capital allocation,the higher the degree of the perception of domestic or international economic policy uncertainty,the higher the efficiency of corporate capital allocation.(2)The impact of the perception of economic policy uncertainty on the efficiency of corporate capital allocation differs between OFDI companies and non-OFDI companies.When the degree of the perception of domestic economic policy uncertainty increases,both OFDI and non-OFDI companies are more sensitive to investment opportunities,and their actual investment is less deviated from expected investment,which means that the efficiency of capital allocation is higher.When the degree of the perception of international economic policy uncertainty increases,compared with non-OFDI companies,OFDI companies are much more sensitive to investment opportunities and less likely to excessively allocate capital,and their actual investment is much less deviated from expected investment.Thus,their efficiency of capital allocation is significantly improved.(3)When the degree of the perception of domestic or international economic policy uncertainty increases,companies would like to reduce industrial investment and increase financial investment,and the higher the risk-revised returns of financial investment relative to industrial investment,the more both the financial investment companies will incease and the industrial investment companies will reduce.This means that when perceiving an increase in domestic or international economic policy uncertainty,due to the lack of clear expectations for future economic policy changes,companies will consider economic factors more when making capital allocation decisions.In other words,companies will increase assets with higher risk-revised returns and reduce assets with lower risk-revised returns in their investment portfolios,which leads to higher efficiency of corporate capital allocation. |
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