容错机制与国有企业创新投资：影响机理及经济后果

There are two different ways to design the incentive mechanism for corporate innovation. On the one hand, existing literature insists on the effect of compensation incentives such as bonus, stock or option on innovation. On the other hand, a few papers suggest establishing a failure tolerance mechanism that allows trial and mistake could spur innovation. According to the theory of behavioral economics, compared with the reward after the success, the failure tolerance mechanism has solved the decision-maker's concerns in advance and thus presents a better incentive effect. However, the empirical research on failure tolerance mechanism is scarce. Since 2016, various provinces issued the policy that establishing the failure tolerance mechanism for political officials including SOE's CEO, which provides an exogenous and staggered shock for our project. By using this shock, we focus on the listed SOEs and construct a comprehensive framework about how failure tolerance affects firm’s innovation. By using this framework, we try to reveal the effect of failure tolerance mechanism on SOE's innovation activities and thus examines its influence channel and economic consequences. The channel of failure tolerance mechanism on innovation are based on risk awareness theory and reputation theory. This research not only provides a brand new theoretical framework and comprehensive empirical evidences for the academia to understand failure tolerance and corporate innovation, but also helps further improve the mechanism design of failure tolerance mechanism, thus facilitating the innovative development of state-owned enterprises.

企业创新的激励机制设计在理论研究中存在两种不同的思路。一是借助薪酬、股权等物质激励手段；二是建立允许试错、容忍失败的容错机制。从行为经济学的角度来看，相比事后的物质奖励，容错机制在事前便解决了决策者的后顾之忧，其形成激励的效果可能更为明显。但是关于容错机制的研究一直十分匮乏。自2016年以来，各省市错时颁布了为领导干部建立容错机制的具体实施意见，这为本课题从容错机制的视角全面考查中国国有企业的创新投资提供了理想的实验场景。本课题以此作为外生冲击，基于行为经济学的理论基础，从风险感知机制和圈层内的声誉机制入手，系统构建容错机制影响国企创新投资的理论框架，首次从容错机制的全新视角深入剖析其对国企创新投资的作用及影响机理，并进而考查其经济后果。本课题不仅为学术界系统理解容错机制与企业创新提供了崭新的理论框架和全面的经验证据，而且有利于进一步完善和改进容错机制方案，进而助力国有企业的创新发展。

本项目借助各省市颁布的为领导干部建立容错机制的具体实施意见，研究国企建立容错机制对其创新行为的影响。具体而言，本项目主要研究以下三个问题：第一，建立容错机制是否能够显著提高国有企业的研发投入？第二，如果这种效应确实存在，那么具体的影响机理是什么？第三，这种促进效应的经济后果是什么，是否会影响企业的创新产出与企业价值？研究表明容错机制的建立可以有效促进企业创新。此外，本项目还从中国传统文化、企业的客户集中度、企业持股金融机构规模以及国际研发合作等视角对企业创新的研究内容进行了拓展，发现了一系列影响企业创新行为的重要因素。本项目的研究不仅为进一步推行容错免责机制，总结并优化相关政策提供决策参考，而且为设计促进企业创新的机制设计提供理论支持。