Financial Flexibility, Investment Expenditure And Performance Of High-tech Enterprises

With the in-depth development of economic globalization,the economic ties between enterprises of various countries are getting closer and closer.Sometimes the economic turbulence of one country finally leads to the global financial crisis,which objectively increases the uncertainty of the macroeconomic environment.In addition to the pressure brought by the international market,Chinese enterprises are also facing problems such as the optimization and upgrading of domestic industries and the constant change of policies and regulations.The instability of the domestic and foreign economic environment greatly restricts the development of enterprises.Because in an unstable economic environment,enterprises are often subject to financing constraints,which makes it difficult to obtain the needed funds from the outside timely,fail to maintain long-term stable investment,underinvest,or even have to give up favorable investment opportunities.Therefore,Chinese enterprises generally show the problems of poor investment capacity,low investment efficiency and the phenomenon of under-investment or over-investment（Qingquan Xin et al.,2007）^[1]（Jianghuai Zheng et al.,2001）^[2].However,it is well known that enterprises create value through investment activities,investment is the basis for enterprise development and expansion of reproduction.Poor investment capacity and low investment efficiency will directly affect the profitability and performance of enterprises.The above problems are more deeply reflected in high-tech enterprises.Because they are different from other enterprises with the characteristics of high investment,high return and high risk,the inefficient investment will impact the performance more.How to improve the investment and financing capacity of enterprises,improve investment efficiency and enterprise performance?Scholars put forward that financial flexibility is the ability of enterprises to obtain funds in a timely and low-cost manner,which can help enterprises improve their investment and financing capacity,seize and take advantage of good investment opportunities,and improve their performance.Therefore,setting investment spending as intervening variable,this paper discusses how financial flexibility affects corporate performance by influencing the investment spending,at the same time,this paper also combines the efficiency index of investment to measure the rationality of the enterprise investment behavior,and provide a more detailed explanation of how financial flexibility affects performance.In this paper,I sort out the relevant literature,combine the principal-agent and information asymmetry to put forward viewpoints and hypotheses,and construct the empirical analysis model.Then,I use the data collected from the CSMAR database of China’s high-tech enterprises from 2013 to 2018,to conduct the empirical study on the relationship between variables,and the following conclusions are drawn:First,financial flexibility is positively correlated with investment expenditure.Improving financial flexibility not only helps to alleviate the shortage of investment,but also aggravates the overinvestment,investment expenditure continuously increases.Second,there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between investment expenditure and enterprise performance,but the inflection point of the inverted U-shaped relationship is not at the expected investment scale,but at a certain level of overinvestment.When the level of investment is low,the underinvestment negatively affects enterprise performance.increase the investment expenditure will improve the enterprise performance.When investment spending exceeds expected level,the overinvestment under a certain extent positively affects enterprise performance,so increase the investment will continue to improve enterprise performance,but when investment exceeds the certain level,overinvestment negatively affects the enterprise performance,business performance began to decline.Third,there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial flexibility and enterprise performance.Investment expenditure plays part of the intermediary role between financial flexibility and enterprise performance.The results of this paper are helpful to refine and enrich the research on financial flexibility,enterprise investment and enterprise performance,and can be used for reference to improve the level of financial flexibility management of high-tech enterprises in China.