The impact of US technology blockade on Chinese high-tech cross-border M&As
In March 2018,the United States released a report on the"301 investigation",accusing China of unfair technology trans-fer,offshore investment and other behaviors that infringe on the interests of U.S.companies.Since then,the number of Chinese cross-border mergers and acquisitions(M&As)in the United States has rapidly declined,while in contrast,Chinese M&As in other coun-tries have skyrocketed in enthusiasm.We wonder whether the opposite trend in the number of Chinese cross-border M&As to the U.S.and to other countries is related to the U.S.technology blockade.The M&A data in this paper comes from the Securities Data Corporation's Global Mergers and Acquisitions(SDC M&A)data-base,which has been widely used in various domestic and foreign investment M&A studies.We obtain a total of 5,037 M&A transac-tion data from 2009-2021.We use the 2018 U.S.301 Investigative Report as the basis,combined with the U.S.classification of high-technology industry categories,and set 24 subsectors such as semiconductors,software,and communications categories out of the 78 industries in the SDC M&A database as the treatment group,and the other industries as the control group.We then construct a DID model to quantitatively assess the impact of the U.S.technology blockade on China's technology-based M&As to other coun-tries.The study finds that the U.S.technology blockade against China generally facilitates China's technology-based cross-border M&As to third-party economies,a finding that holds true after a series of robustness tests,such as changing the identification strate-gy,changing the sample,and falsification tests.The mechanism analysis suggests that the U.S.technology blockade stimulates tech-nology-based cross-border M&As by Chinese investors to economies that are highly substitutable or closely linked to China's high-technology sector,and thus it can be argued that the substitution effect brought by the technology blockade outweighs the negative dem-onstration effect.In addition,the host country's political and economic relations with the United States do not constitute an important factor in the impact of the United States technology embargo on technology-based M&As from China to third-party economies.The heterogeneity analysis found that the United States technology embargo significantly facilitated China's cross-border M&As to third-party economies in the areas of telecommunications software and health care,but not in energy and transportation.This paper may have the following marginal contributions:(1)Distinguishing from the existing literature that mostly studies the impact of trade barriers on China's outward foreign direct investment(OFDI)and a few literatures that deal with investment barriers,this paper focuses on investment barriers and technology-based M&As,emphasizing the relationship between the two in order to enrich the existing research.(2)While previous literature has mostly focused on the national level,this paper refines the research perspective to the industry level and examines the path of influence therein,which helps to clarify the mechanism of the role of technological block-ade of the host country on China's technology-based M&As.(3)This paper fills the gaps in academic empirical research related to the impact of the U.S.comprehensive technical embargo on China on investment in 2018.Currently,relevant studies mostly focus on qualitative analysis,and this paper adopts the DID methodology which can quantitatively examine its impact on China's technology-based M&As,in order to expand and supplement the research on the impact of the U.S.technology blockade in 2018,which helps to grasp the substantive impact of the U.S.technology blockade with greater precision.
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万方数据
