An Empirical Research On The Relationship Among Financial Slack, Equity Property And R&D Investment Of High-tech Enterprises

The21th century is a century of knowledge, in which technology becomes the focus of competition. To promote the capability of independent innovation is not only the strategic aim of the country, but also the key for enterprises to achieve long-time development. R&D investment is the inevitable way to promote independent innovation, especially for high-tech enterprises. There exists a problem for high-tech enterprises in our country, that is, the company size is big enough, but not competitive. Compared with enterprises in western countries, the innovation capability is relatively weak, and R&D investment is obviously inadequate. It has been researched that R&D investment is influenced by factors as company size, profitability, the internal and external system environment et al. Numbers of papers have done research in the view of company governance structure, but this paper found that R&D activities is heavily relied on resources, among which financial resource is of the greatest significance, therefore, the quantity of financial resources has a direct effect on R&D activities. What’s more, the unique characteristic of R&D activities, that is high risk, and long-time period to get return, determines the strategy of R&D activities is one which easily results conflict between stakeholders. Stockholders of different properties have different attitudes towards R&D investment, especially when the financial resource of the enterprise is in the status of excess, for there are multiple choices as to how to allocate them for the enterprise to choose from. This paper reviews and summarizes past literature, on the basis of four theories, that is the organization slack theory, principal-agent theory, equity incentive theory and information asymmetry theory, this paper first explained the relationship of financial slack and R&D investment intensity, and then did an empirical test to provide proof for the hypothesis before. The use of objective method in this paper is a breakthrough from the point of methodologies. And it also enriched the current researches, at the same time, provide feasible suggestion for the actual problem faced by high-tech enterprises.