The Impact Of Executive Compensation And Media Attention On R&D Investment

In recent years,China’s information technology industry has been developing rapidly and the commercialisation of 5G is advancing in a deeper direction.5G technology has a profound impact on the country’s economic development.To build an innovative country,China should continue to strengthen its investment in 5G technology and support the research and development of 5G-related enterprises.Investment in R&D is a key indicator of an enterprise’s level of innovation.However,the long lead time and high risk of R&D activities have to some extent hindered the R&D investment decisions of enterprise managers.How to promote the R&D activities of 5G-related companies and encourage them to increase their R&D investment has become a real problem that needs to be addressed!Clearly,internal governance factors executive compensation and external governance factors media concerns may have an impact on corporate R&D investment.Corporate R&D investment plans are of great importance and are an important strategic investment act for the company,requiring strategic planning and organisational implementation by executives.In order to alleviate the principal-agent problem caused by the different objectives pursued by owners and operators,and to reduce agency costs,it is particularly important to design a reasonable executive compensation system.With increasingly strin gent information disclosure requiremen ts and rapidly changing internet technology,media attention provides an effective monitoring tool for external investors in companies.Media exposure has a deterrent effect on corporate managers’ inaction and misconduct.How executive compensation incentives and media attention affect corporate R&D activities deserves in-depth and detailed study.This paper selects listed companies in the 5G industry as the research object,and empirically investigates the mechanism of executive compensation and media attention on corporate R&D investment,as well as the moderating effect of media attention on the relationship between executive compensation and R&D investment,in an attempt to answer the question of what kind of executive compensation design and what kind of media attention can help improve R&D investment in 5G-related companies.Previously,scholars have mostly discussed the relationship between executive compensation and R&D investment,media attention and R&D investment,but few scholars have discussed the relationship between the three at the same time;most of the existing studies on media attention and R&D investment use paper media as the media data source,ignoring the important role of online media and social media.The relationship between the three variables will be examined,and the media will be divided into traditional paper media and emerging online media,and further divided into official microblogs and microblogging financial vloggers corresponding to paper media,to explore in detail the role of different media on R&D investment and the moderating role of media attention in the relationship between executive compensation and R&D investment.Based on signaling theory,incentive theory and core competency theory,we propose reasonable hypotheses and construct several regression variable models.The research sample was selected from listed companies in the 5G industry from 2019-2021,with data on R&D investment and executive compensation sourced from the Guotaian database,traditional paper media data collected manually,and emerging online media attention data crawled using Python,with a total of 777 valid data collected to match the data from multiple sources.Correlation analysis,covariance diagnosis,multiple regression and dominance analysis were conducted using SPSS statistical analysis software to replace the explanatory variable R&D investment measure for robustness testing.Regarding the role of executive compensation and media attention on corporate R&D investment,the findings are as follows:(1)within reasonable limits,increasing executive compensation helps increase R&D investment of 5G listed companies;(2)traditional paper media and emerging online media attention,both have a direct positive effect on R&D investment,and the influence of emerging online media attention on R&D investment is greater than that of traditional paper media attention on R&D investment(3)The official microblogs of the paper media play a positive moderating role in the relationship between executive compensation and company R&D investment,while the traditional paper media fail to play a moderating role in the relationship between the two.Based on the above findings,this paper proposes countermeasures for the 5G industry,various media and government regulators.The research in this paper enriches the study of the influencing factors related to corporate R&D investment and breaks down the types of media attention;it provides new insights to promote enterprises related to the 5G industry to increase their R&D investment and promote the continuous development of 5G technology.