Stock Incentive Schemes Spur Corporate Transformation

Abstract

Corporate is the most active micro-subject in digital economy, and also the subject of research and development and application of digital technology. This article uses China’s 2007-2021 Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies and macro-economic datasets to empirically test the impact of stock incentive plan on corporate digital transformation. The results show that stock incentive can significantly drive the digital transformation, and this conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. The promotion effect of stock incentive on corporate digital transformation is more obvious in the group of corporate with high shareholding ratio of short-term institutional investors, high ratio of analyst downgrade research report to the total research report and the questioned corporate group. Mechanism analysis shows that stock incentive reduces managerial myopia and facilitate corporate digital transformation. The research conclusions of this paper not only enrich the literature achievements related to stock incentive and corporate digital transformation, but also provide empirical evidence for the corporate decision-making and effectively promote the development of digital economy.