| Chinese enterprises’ innovation input accounts for more than 76% of the total social innovation input.The enterprise sector has become the most active innovation subject,which has a non-negligible impact on China’s innovation-driven development.The report of the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasizes that we should strengthen the dominant position of enterprise scientific and technological innovation.The necessary innovation input is the key factor affecting the innovation development of enterprises.Therefore,how to strengthen the financial support for innovation input of enterprise sector is an important issue to strengthen the dominant position of enterprise innovation and promote the national innovation-driven strategy and high-quality development.The “Suggestions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-term Goals for2035” clearly stated that it is necessary to build a financial system to effectively support the real economy and improve the level of financial technology.Fintech is an organic combination of finance and technology.With the help of emerging technologies,it can support and optimize traditional financial business,further improve the efficiency of financial services for the development of the real economy,and provide new impetus to encourage enterprises to increase innovation input.In this context,this paper studies the relationship between fintech and enterprise innovation input and its mechanism.In this paper,text mining method is adopted to collect the Baidu search index of the original fintech keywords in each province over the years,and three sub-indexes including the total index of fintech,the coverage breadth index of fintech,the use depth index of fintech and the degree of fintech technology are synthesized through factor analysis.At the same time,the synthetic fintech index is matched with the data of A-share enterprises from 2011 to 2021,and the influence of fintech on enterprise innovation input is studied.Firstly,the bidirectional fixed-effect model was used for empirical test.In order to ensure the scientificity of the empirical results,the method of 2SLS was also adopted to deal with the endogeneity problem.The robustness test was carried out by changing variables,changing models and adjusting samples,and the Heckman two-stage method was used to control sample selection bias.Secondly,the heterogeneity of the influence of fintech on innovation input was investigated in different regions,with different backgrounds of corporate executives and at different growth stages.Finally,the mediating role of leverage,agency cost and financing constraint in the process of fintech’s effect on innovation input is investigated by using the intermediary model.Through theoretical and empirical tests,this paper draws some conclusions.First,the development of fintech can indeed significantly improve the level of innovation investment of enterprises.Second,corporate leverage,agency costs and financing constraints have significant mediating effects in the process of fintech improving enterprise innovation input.Third,fintech has significant heterogeneity in its impact on firms’ innovation input.The first is regional heterogeneity that compared with enterprises in the eastern region,fintech has a better incentive effect on innovation investment of enterprises in the central and western regions.The second is the heterogeneity of senior executives’ background that compared with enterprises without financial background,fintech has a better incentive effect on the innovation investment of enterprises with financial background.The last one is the heterogeneity of enterprise growth stage that compared with the growth stage and decline stage,fintech has a better incentive effect on the innovation investment of mature enterprises. |
