Environmental Uncertainty,Financial Flexibility And R&D Investment

The intrinsic motivation of the enterprise was crucial to the transformation of economies from scale-scale and extensive growth to quality-efficiency intensive growth.Only if the enterprises who were micro economic agents intensified innovation could the industrial structure be promoted.At the same time,the increasingly competitive market in the era of information economy also required companies to seek survival and long-term development by R&D investment.How to promote R&D investment of enterprises,especially for small or medium-sized enterprises,become the focus of mutual attention in the academic and practical fields.Based on the data of SEM listed companies during 2011 to 2016,this paper studied the relationship between financial flexibility and R&D investment from the theoretical analysis and empirical test.And then the study took into account environmental uncertainty as regulating variable of the research framework to make a research on the relationship between environmental uncertainty,financial flexibility and R&D investment.The results of research showed that financial flexibility can promote the company's R&D investment.The environmental uncertainty can enhance the role of financial flexibility in R&D investment,and the higher degree of environmental uncertainty,the greater effect of financial flexibility on R&D investment.Further,cash flexibility and debt flexibility can all promote enterprises' R&D investment.However,environmental uncertainty only has a significant regulatory effect on the relationship between debt flexibility and R&D investment.The higher degree of uncertainty,the greater impact of debt flexibility on R&D investment.The adjusting impact on the relationship between cash flexibility and R&D investment was not obvious.Maybe these conclusions had some theoretical implications for the innovation practice of small and medium-sized enterprises.