Corporate Social Responsibility,Analyst Following And Inefficient Investment

Investment activities are one of the three kinds of corporate activities.Efficient investment can not only bring continuous,stable and considerable cash flow to the enterprise by improving the resource allocation efficiency,thereby achieving the goal of value creation and sustainable development,but also help promote the sustainable and healthy development of economy.However,enterprises face the problem of inefficient investment in China.Information asymmetry,agenct problem and financing constraints are the main reasons for inefficient investment.How to restrain inefficient investment effectively is a difficult problem to be solved urgently in the practical and theoretical circles.Corporate governance is an effective mechanism for improving the efficiency of corporate investment.In recent years,society,government and academia have gradually paid attention to corporate social responsibility.Corporate social responsibility is a part of corporate governance.Whether can corporate social responsibility affect corporate investment? Corporate social responsibility performance can provide incremental information to the public.Will this information cause analysts to track it and then affect the corporate investment efficiency,that is,does the analyst following play the mediating or masking role in the relationship between corporate social responsibility and inefficient investment?Therefore,this paper explores the impact of corporate social responsibility on inefficient investment and the specific implementation mechanism of this impact taking analyst following as the path,which is based on theories including information asymmetry theory,stakeholder theory and signaling theory.This article takes A-share listed companies in China as samples from 2012 to 2017 and draws following conclusions:(1)fulfilling corporate social responsibility well can restrain under-investment or over-investment;(2)fulfilling corporate social responsibility well can promote analyst following;(3)analyst following plays a part of the mediating effect in the process of corporate social responsibility alleviating under-investment,and it also plays a masking effect in the process of corporate social responsibility alleviating over-investment.What's more,this paper tests whether there are significant differences for above conclusions in different property rights? Finally,it is found that the mediating effect of analyst following in the process of corporate social responsibility alleviating under-investment exists in the sample of private enterprises,but not exist in the sample of state-owned enterprises.And the masking effect of analyst following in the process of corporate social responsibility alleviating over-investment exists in the sample of private enterprises,but not exist in the sample of state-owned enterprises.The research in this paper helps to understand the specific mechanism of corporate social responsibility affecting inefficient investment and the role of analysts in the capital market.Based on the above research findings,this paper proposes the following three suggestions for government,enterprises or regulatory authorities from two aspects of corporate social responsibility or analyst following:(1)the government should establish and improve the legal system related to corporate social responsibility;(2)companies ought to fulfill the social responsibility from the perspective of corporate governance and strategy;(3)regulatory authorities are supposed to promote the development of the analyst industry and strengthen industry management.