A Study On The Relationship Between Top Managers' Tenure, Age And R&d Investment In Public Company

Under the market economic background, competitive is the eternal theme, the traditional ability of production experience, technology, the scale of product and product marketing are no longer the absolute advantages of the company, R&D activities which related to generate high-tech intangible assets and intellectual assets have become the lifeline for enterprises survival and development. As the subject of managerial decision making, the top manager are the coalition of knowledge and ability, the characteristics of scarce and hard to gain make them the most important resources for company. The personal characteristics of the top manager will affect the decision of R&D invest. This dissertation chooses the angle view of top managers'tenure and age to explain the reasons for the difference of public companies'R&D investment.This dissertation makes use of the data and information from Chinese manufacturing listed company published in Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2004 and 2009 which announced R&D expense as sample to explore the relationship between the Top managers'tenure, age and R&D investment. At first, this dissertation analyzed our country's R&D investment's present situation and problems, listed some factors which may affect R&D investment, analyzed the relationship between R&D investment and Technique Innovation, Core Competence. Then, we put forward our research hypothesizes based on the prior scholars'research results, and building a multivariate regression model about the relationship between top manager's tenure, age and R&D investment. After that, the thesis listed all the variables'describe statistic characteristics using the Eviews and Spss software. At last, the thesis studied and verified the relationship between Top managers'tenure, age and R&D investments using the method of panel data analysis.The research results show that: we find a inverted U-shaped relationship between top manager's tenure and R&D spending, as the top manager's tenure extended, R&D expending first increase and them decrease; top manager's age and R&D spending have a negative relationship, older managers have less motivation to innovate, the input less R&D expense; The research results also reveal that company scale has negative relationship with R&D investment, LEV also has negative relationship with R&D investment, main business growth, profit rate, technique assets rate and the nature of the company also have obvious relationship with R&D expense. Otherwise, we divided the samples into State-owned enterprises group and non-State-owned enterprises group, the thesis studied the relationship between the top managers'tenure, age and R&D investment in these two group separately, the results shows that top managers in non-State-owned enterprises group have more significant impact on R&D investment than those in State-owned enterprises group, non-State-owned enterprises group have more motivations to invest R&D activities. At last, based on the conclusions of empirical study, we give some related advices for advance enterprises R&D investment of our country.