Will the Development of Fintech Affect Corporate Investment Efficiency?
In the wake of the development of new technologies as well as empowering industrial transformation and upgrading, the wave of fintech in China has stepped into the golden age, which opens up a new way to improve corporate investment efficiency.Enhancing investment efficiency is vital for the long-term sustainability of businesses. Thus, under the new economic norms, identifying avenues for financial reform and innovation to boost corporate investment efficiency is a crucial step for the transformation and upgrading of the real economy. In this context, efficiently managing corporate investment has garnered focused attention from both academia and the capital market sector. Exploring the relationship between fintech and corporate investment efficiency is crucial for advancing the real economy.This study uses microdata from A-share listed companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, covering the period from 2011 to 2022, to examine the impact of fintech development on corporate investment efficiency . It employs methods such as logarithmic transformations and the entropy value method to synthesize the Baidu search index of key fintech-related keywords into a provincial fintech index. The absolute value of Richardson's expected investment model residual is employed to assess corporate investment efficiency. A two-way fixed effects model is constructed, and Stata software tools are utilized to perform regression analysis on panel data, empirically examining the impact of fintech development on corporate investment efficiency, and the heterogeneity of sub-samples is analyzed from the perspectives of investment situation, enterprise size, and ownership nature. Additionally, it explores mediation mechanisms involving financing constraints, information asymmetry, mismatches between investment and financing, and internal control.The results indicate that fintech enhancements significantly boost corporate investment efficiency. The increase in the level of fintech development has a significant impact on the improvement of investment efficiency in underinvested enterprises, state-owned enterprises, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. The examination of the intermediary mechanism pathways reveals that fintech advancements substantially ease financing constraints for listed companies, reduce information asymmetry, alleviate mismatches between investment and financing, and improve the level of internal control. These improvements contribute to resolving investment and financing challenges, thereby enhancing investment efficiency.Combining the traditional indicators and new indicator measures that affect the improvement of corporate investment efficiency, this study expands the research dimension of the influence mechanism between the level of fintech development and corporate investment efficiency and responds to the practical problem that fintech development will affect corporate investment efficiency of corporate in a multi-perspective way. In addition, it explains the mechanism of how the fintech development level positively affects corporate investment efficiency, enriches and expands the research on the related impact of fintech development on high-quality development of corporate, and provides referable academic references and practical strategies for the research on the path of investment efficiency improvement.
fintechcorporate investment efficiencyfinancing constraintsinternal control
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
