CORPORATE DIGITALISATION AND HETEROGENEOUS TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS: IS CAPITAL ALLOCATION EFFECTIVE?

Abstract

Can corporate digitalisation unleash an information dividend to drive technological innovations? Few researches examine this issue from diversified perspectives of capital allocation. Based on a dataset of Chinese A-listed enterprises during 2007–2019, this paper measures digitalisation by capturing frequencies of data-related words in corporate reports, and generalised moment method is used to explore the heterogeneous effects of corporate digitalisation on green or traditional technological innovation. The result shows that corporate digitalisation is positively correlated with both technological innovations, and it presents a greater promotion in traditional technological innovation than in green technological innovation. Capital compliant allocation based on improving managerial opportunism only plays a significant moderating role in green technological innovation, while capital optimal allocation significantly accelerates the incentive of digitalisation on both technological innovations, with its improvement on traditional technological innovation is much greater. Besides, the dynamic panel threshold model captures significant double-threshold effect of corporate digitalisation on technological innovations, manifesting as positive U-shaped curves with slopes change around the second threshold. Compared with the optimal interval to promotes technological innovations, digitalisation in more than half enterprises still fails to provide incentives for technological innovations.