Research on the influence of minority shareholders' online voting on enterprise innovation -- An empirical study of the A-share listed companies in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges

Abstract

Minority shareholders are important stakeholders of the company, which could influence the corporate innovation to a certain extent. This paper studies the impact of online voting by minority shareholders on corporate innovation, which could enrich the research and expand the theoretical mechanism of the voting role of small and medium shareholders. Taking the 2008-2020 years of China's A-share listed companies as a sample and using the relative proportion of minority shareholders to attend the general meeting to measure the online voting of minority shareholders and the rate of R&D investment to operating income to measure corporate innovation, we found that:(1)the degree of online voting participation of small and medium shareholders is significantly negatively associated to corporate innovation;(2) the degree of online voting participation of minority shareholders reduces the voice of the management , weakening the management's constraint on the interests of large shareholders (3) With the improvement of the shareholding balance, the impact of online voting participation of minority shareholders on enterprise innovation decreases significantly; the more the stake of the largest shareholder , the stronger the inhibitory effect of minority shareholders' online voting participation on enterprise innovation is.