Overcoming the “diversification trap”:firm investment decisions and innovation under policy uncertainty

Abstract

Existing research generally regards economic policy uncertainty (EPU) as a type of macro-shock and fails to distinguish the perception of policy uncertainty among different enterprises. We use a text mining tool to extract a measure of the EPU perceived by individual firms listed on Chinese stock markets from their annual reports between 2007 and 2020 to investigate the policy uncertainty's impact on enterprises' cross-regional investment and innovation. Our findings reveal the following. First, increased policy uncertainty will inhibit innovation in enterprises. Second, policy uncertainty reduces cross-regional investment, and the influence is time-dynamic and different under the heterogeneous enterprise characteristics. Third, the negative impact of policy uncertainty on cross-regional investment by enterprises is primarily reflected in investments unrelated to the enterprise's technology. Policy uncertainty will promote investment in technology-related areas. Finally, the impact of policy uncertainty and an increase in technology-related cross-regional investment will help (1) lower financing costs via the signal effect, (2) broaden knowledge, and (3) strengthen enterprise resilience and thus promote innovation.