Industry policy, cross-region investment, and enterprise investment efficiency

Abstract

The introduction of industry policies creates a non-market-oriented policy arbitrage space, which in turn triggers enterprises to adopt "strategic" investments to obtain government policy preferences, which may induce irrational over-investment behaviors and even lead to long-term investment inefficiencies. For an empirical study of the impact of industry policy for the cross-region enterprise investment in specific locations, we manually collected information on industry policy in various regions, as well as data on the establishment of subsidiaries of Chinese listed companies from 2006 to 2019.The results show that enterprises are more likely to invest in regions supported by industry policies. If the enterprise's location is not supported by policies, the impact of this policy "gap" will be strengthened. We find that the higher the level of finance in the region where the enterprise is located, the greater the possibility of the enterprise's cross-region investment. Our research also shows that private enterprise has more substantial incentives to engage in "policy arbitrage", and state-owned enterprises are less affected. In china, a lot of enterprises in regions with high returns on capital have been investing in regions with low returns has increased. However, the increased intensity of investment in low-return regions will significantly inhibit the production efficiency of these enterprises. Our findings help clarify the effect of public policies on the enterprise's investment behavior and efficiency, which enriches the research on the impact of government macroeconomic policies on enterprise micro decision-making. We believe that, when promoting regional industrial upgrades through industry policies, it is necessary to guide enterprises to follow market rules to make market-oriented investments.