Public attention and investment efficiency: Incentive effect or deterrent effect? Analysis on heterogeneous bilateral stochastic frontier model

Abstract

Based on the attention theory and agent theory, the research expands the research on the influencing factors of the company's investment behavior and further analyzes the causes of investment behavior from the perspective of public concern. This study uses the data on Chinese listed companies for the first time to empirically analyze the influence of public attention on enterprise investment behavior and its mechanism, which fills the gap of the lack of research in related fields and provides an important supplement to the research on the relationship between management heterogeneity and investment behavior. Considering that there may be endogenous problems in the model, this study further uses identification strategies, such as executive transition analysis and panel tool variable estimation, and all the results show that public attention can significantly improve the investment level of enterprises. Finally, this study uses media attention based on the Baidu search index and quantitative indicators of financial news from newspapers to conduct a series of robustness tests further to prove the robustness and reliability of the regression models. It is found that public attention has a significant positive effect on investment efficiency, strategy formulation, and internal control of enterprises and has a certain deterrent effect that has a more obvious positive effect on the investment efficiency of large enterprises. Public attention has promoted the investment efficiency of enterprises and had a certain incentive effect through governance mechanisms such as the overseas experience of executives, consistent design of management interests, and mitigation of short-sightedness of the management. In the process of enterprise management and operation, we should correctly treat the influence of public concern and attach importance to the structure configuration of management.