Does real estate bubble affect corporate innovation? Evidence from China

Abstract

With the rapid increase of downward pressure on China’s economy, the stability of the property market, as an important part of the economic transformation process, also has a far-reaching impact on enterprises’ R&D investment. We select the data of Chinese large and medium-sized industrial enterprises from 1998 to 2015 as our research sample and propose a new combination measurement model based on closeness degree to measure the real estate bubble level in China accurately. The structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) theory is utilized to empirically test the dynamic relationship between the real estate bubble, corporate liquidity, and R&D investment. The results indicate that the real estate bubble level in China is increasing, and a certain risk of deviating from the safety interval in the future exists; The rapid expansion of the real estate bubble has a continuing negative impact on corporate R&D investment, that is, its "credit mitigation effect" is much smaller than the "capital relocation effect," and industrial enterprises will fall into the so-called "low-tech lock-in" state. In other words, to a certain extent, the development of this kind of real estate bubble will not be conducive to the transformation and upgradation of enterprises and long-term economic growth.