Research On The Influence Of Credit Ratings On Enterprises' R&D Investment Under The Perspective Of Financing Constraint

R&D investment shortage problem is very common in Chinese enterprises. As the effective reference for evaluating the company's reputation and quality, the high or low level of corporate credit ratings will affect the degree of information asymmetry which the enterprise external financing face, the external financing ability and the external financing costs, credit rating plays a very important role on external financing, and then have important influence on decision-making and behavior of enterprise's R&D investment which need a large amount of external funding. After looking for the deeper reasons, we find that financing constraint is an important factor which restricts enterprise's R&D investment. Different enterprises face different degree of financing constraints, and then there are certain differences on the incremental information function of credit ratings. External financing constraints can be divided into debt financing constraints and equity financing constraints according to financing channels, the impacting routes and effect of credit rating on two kinds of external financing are different. Enterprise's own characteristics such as nature of the ownership, firm size and pledge of stock rights, affect the real financing constraints which enterprises faced, they are forms of financing constraints essentially.The paper reviews a large amount of related literatures and mainly discusses the influence of credit rating on enterprise's R&D investment under perspective of financing constraints. The paper adopts the method of combining theoretical analysis and empirical test, and then analyzes the mechanism of the influence of credit rating on enterprise's R&D investment, and the moderating mechanism of degree of financing constraints. Using the related data of A-share listed companies of China from 2007 to 2014 as samples, this paper builds a financing constraints comprehensive index by using multivariate discriminant analysis method, and studies the influence of the credit ratings on R&D investment, the moderating effect of financing constraints or it's different forms on credit rating and enterprise's R&D investment and the difference of moderating effect of financing constraints on credit rating and enterprise's R&D investment empirically by using multiple linear regression analysis method.The results show that the higher the level of credit rating is, the more R&D investment in listed companies will be. And there is a significant regulating effect of the degree of financing constraints on the relation between credit rating and R&D investment, further inspection show that the regulating effect of debt financing constraints is significant, but the regulating effect of equity financing constraints is not significant. The different forms of financing constraints such as nature of the ownership, firm size and pledge of stock rights all have a significant impact on the relation between credit rating and R&D investment.