An Empirical Study On The Innovation Of Family Firms Based On The Religious Belief Of Founders

In the process of enterprise management,enterprise innovation has gradually become the top priority of enterprise development,our country still concentrated on the study of enterprise innovation in the enterprise internal funds and macro policy,ignoring the important decision makers-top managers of enterprise innovation.As the one controller of family firms,the founders have an exclusive power of decision-making.These personal traits,such as age,gender,education background or even belief,are the affective elements that influence people’s decision.We obtain data firm from a 2008 Chinese survey conducted jointly by(ⅰ)the United FrontWork Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee,(ⅱ)theAll-China Federation of Industry and Commerce,(ⅲ)the State Administration for Industry and Commerce of the People’s Republic of China,and(ⅳ)the Private Economy Research Institute of China.Firtstly,the data are processed and detailed statistical description,then the least square method is used to make an empirical study on the influence of the religious belief of the founder of the private enterprise and the enterprise innovation,and through the TSLS robustness test in the end.We propose that family firms with religious founders have less risk than other family firms.Using a sample of 4098 family firms in China,we find that firms founded by religious entrepreneurs have lower degrees of innovation intention compared to firms founded by nonreligious entrepreneurs,as measured by R&D expenditures and patents.These findings are consistent with our proposition.However,these findings primarily hold for entrepreneurs who adhere to Western religions but not to Eastern religions.As such,our paper makes important contributions to the literature on family-firms and their risk aversion and the literature on the relation between religion and innovation.