董事高管责任保险促进企业创新吗？——基于信贷寻租与融资约束的视角

《外国经济与管理》 2022年44卷第3期 页码：103 - 117  online：2022年3月15日

董事高管责任保险促进企业创新吗？——基于信贷寻租与融资约束的视角

Does D&O Insurance Promote Enterprise Innovation? Based on the Perspective of Credit Rent-seeking and Financing Constraints

作者（中）：赵国宇, 梁慧萍

作者（英）：Zhao Guoyu, Liang Huiping

作者单位：1.广东财经大学 会计学院，广东 广州 510320

摘要：董事高管责任保险于2002年引入中国市场，主要针对董事或高管在正常履职过程中，因被指控工作疏忽或行为不当而被追究其个人赔偿责任时，由保险机构代付。通过采用中国A股上市公司数据，本文基于“外部投资者”视角探究董责险对企业创新的作用及路径。研究发现：董责险能够正向影响企业创新，且可通过降低融资约束和信贷寻租来促进企业创新，这说明了融资约束和信贷寻租具有中介效应。进一步研究发现，认购董责险提高了企业的信贷资源获取能力，具体表现为银行会主动提供更多的长期贷款和减少短期贷款的供给，且上述关系在民营企业中更明显。认购董责险提高了信息披露质量，进一步降低了信息不对称程度和加大了对公司内部的监管力度，进而更大程度地促进了企业创新。本文弥补了从外部投资者视角探究董责险影响企业创新投资的不足，验证了“董责险机制具有信号传递功能”的观点，即董责险通过引入第三监督机构改善公司治理效果，向外界投资者传递积极的信号，从而提高了投资者的信心。

关键词：董责险; 企业创新; 融资约束; 信贷寻租

Summary: Innovation cannot be achieved without external financial support. However, innovation activities are often trapped in the predicament of financing constraints and credit rent-seeking, which makes the innovation effect far deviate from the optimal value. External financing constraints and credit rent-seeking seriously hinder innovation input from both capital and motivation, resulting in obvious dual resource allocation problems of insufficient investment and financing difficulties in enterprise innovation. Information asymmetry and agency problems are the key factors that lead to external financing constraints and credit rent-seeking. Therefore, the fundamental way to solve the dual problems of financing constraints and credit rent-seeking is to reduce the information asymmetry and agency problems associated with the process of enterprise management. As an emerging external governance mechanism, D&O insurance aims to protect managers from personal liability in the event of litigation brought by shareholders or other stakeholders （such as creditors） alleging misconduct in the performance of their duties. Existing studies on the relationship between D&O insurance and enterprise innovation are mainly based on the managers’ income incentive and tolerance for innovation failure. Few studies pay attention to the impact of D&O insurance on the introduction of enterprise innovation funds from the perspective of external investors. Thus, in this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by exploring the impact of the relationship between D&O insurance, financing constraints and credit rent-seeking on enterprise innovation.In the empirical section, we collect data on D&O insurance for Chinese public enterprises from the CNRDS database and other variables’ data are derived from the CSMAR database over the 2009-2019 period. Through empirical results, we find that D&O insurance can positively affect enterprise innovation, and it can promote enterprise innovation by reducing financing constraints and credit rent-seeking, which indicates that financing constraints and credit rent-seeking have a mediating effect. To address the possible endogeneity, we use the Heckman’s two-stage method, alternative explanatory variables and adding missing variables, and then perform additional tests to examine the underlying economic mechanism of our findings. We find that: （1） D&O insurance improves enterprises’ ability to obtain credit resources, which is embodied in the fact that banks actively provide more long-term loans to enterprises and reduce short-term loans, and the above relationship is more obvious in private enterprises. （2） D&O insurance improves the quality of information disclosure, further reduces the degree of information asymmetry and strengthens the internal supervision of enterprises, thus promoting enterprise innovation to a greater extent.This paper makes the following contributions: First, it makes up for the lack of exploring the impact of D&O insurance on enterprise innovation investment from the perspective of external investors, verifying the point of “D&O insurance has the signal transfer function”, namely, by introducing the third supervision institution to improve the corporate governance effect, it can send positive signals to outside investors, thus improving the confidence of investors. Second, the theory of signal transmission is used to explain the influence mechanism of D&O insurance. The existing literature mainly uses the principal-agent theory to analyze the governance effect of D&O insurance on enterprise innovation. Third, through the two paths of financing constraints and credit rent-seeking, the influence mechanism of D&O insurance on enterprise innovation is deeply analyzed, which enriches the relevant researches in the field of financing constraints and credit rent-seeking.To some extent, this paper shows the governance effect of D&O insurance in Chinese enterprises, which is of great policy significance for promoting enterprise innovation and promoting D&O insurance in the Chinese insurance market.

Key words: D&O insurance; enterprise innovation; financing constraints; credit rent-seeking

DOI：10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20210921.201

收稿日期：2021-4-12

基金项目：国家社科基金一般项目（15BGL064）

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