Dividend Payment Of Central Enterprises And Over Investment Of Enterprises:Inhibition Or Promotion?

Under the current background of economic transformation and comprehensive deepening of reform,the supply side structural reform with improving efficiency as the core puts forward higher requirements for the operation of enterprises in China,especially the central enterprises as the main operation carrier of state-owned capital.Improving the operation performance of central enterprises is an important means to improve the efficiency of state-owned capital allocation,and also an inevitable choice to deepen the supply side structural reform and promote the high-quality development of the national economy.However,the special nature of China’s central enterprises makes them suffer from the problem of over investment.Improving the investment efficiency of central enterprises is an important way to improve the business performance of enterprises,to promote the rational allocation of state-owned capital and to achieve high-quality economic development.In 2019.Premier Li Keqiang pointed out in his report on the work of the government that in order to support the central government in opening up resources and reducing expenditure,it is necessary to increase the proportion of profits paid by specific state-owned financial institutions and state-owned enterprises,and the issue of the dividend of state-owned enterprises has once again aroused widespread concern of the society.Under the background of the current macro policy of tax reduction and fee reduction,it has become the general trend to reduce the financial pressure of the state and increase the proportion and scope of the dividend paid by the central enterprises.Since 2008,China has officially implemented the budget system for the operation of state-owned capital at the central level.The central enterprises included in the budget shall pay in proportion the state-owned capital income(commonly known as the dividend payment of the central enterprises),and the dividend payment proportion shall be increased twice.Since the implementation of the policy.scholars have studied the implementation effect of the state-owned assets budget system in strengthening the supervision of state-owned assets and optimizing the allocation of state-owned assets.and formed two main views.One view is that the implementation of the state-owned budget system can play a control role,which is conducive to improving the operation efficiency of the central enterprises;the other part of scholars believe that in the current situation of imperfect system environment and insufficient policy practice,the effectiveness of the system is difficult to be fully exerted,or even will play a certain negative role.The policy has developed to this day,and its policy governance effect on specific behaviors such as investment and financing of central enterprises deserves further studyIn this paper,based on the state-owned capital budget system,using this rare quasi natural experimental condition,we select A-share listed companies controlled by the central enterprises and private listed companies not affected by the policy,which are included in the scope of state-owned capital income payment in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets as the research objects.A total of 4303 annual observation values of 1281 listed companies in 2008-2018 are obtained.PSM-DID method is used to study the impact of the dividend payment system on the over-investment of central enterprises is to restrain or promote.It is found that increasing the proportion of dividends paid by the central enterprises can reduce the internal free cash flow of enterprises,so as to play a role in both pre-constraint and post-supervision,alleviate the over investment behavior of enterprises,confirming the corporate governance effect of the policy.After further introducing the influencing factors of executives’ overconfidence and industry competition degree,it is found that when there is overconfidence in the management of enterprises,the increase in the proportion of dividends of central enterprises has no obvious effect on the over investment of enterprises;In addition,the increase in the proportion of dividends paid by state-owned enterprises has different effects on the over investment of central companies with different degrees of competition.Compared with the highly competitive industries,the increase in the proportion of dividends paid by central-owned enterprises has a more significant inhibitory effect on excessive investment in central enterprises with low competition.The conclusion of this paper not only enriches the research on the effect of the implementation of the dividend payment policy of the central enterprises,but also supplements and improves the influencing factors of the over investment of the enterprises.Taking the policy of turning over state-owned capital income as the starting point,it finds new evidence of restraining over investment of enterprises in the context of China.This paper proves that the institutional advantage of national policy can be transformed into governance efficiency,which provides reference for the external governance effect of national policy release,and also provides a new way of thinking and new method for optimizing enterprise governance,and becomes a new "weapon"for reducing agency cost and improving corporate investment efficiency.