管理学院管理学和经济学前沿讲座之一四二讲
公司财务与金融投资学术讲座第65讲
讲座主题： Scientific Personnel Reallocation and Firm Innovation: Evidence from China’s Higher Education Expansion
主讲嘉宾：荣昭 (西南财经大学经济与管理研究院 副教授)
讲座时间：2013年11月21日（周四）16:00-17:30
讲座地点：管理学院S443
主 持 人：李广众教授
主办院系：中山大学管理学院财务与投资系
欢迎广大师生积极参加！
Scientific personnel are the most important input for innovation investment. It takes many years for scientific personnel to accumulate their high human capital. For this reason, the supply of scientific personnel is inelastic in the short run. In last two decades, many countries have experienced an expansion of public research. This expansion should have made scientific personnel less available to private research, thereby negatively influencing firm innovation. However, it is hard to empirically identify this crowding-out effect because the reallocation of scientific personnel from private sectors to public sectors is endogenously determined by the market.
China’s higher education expansion (hereafter college expansion) since 1999 was, by any standard, dramatic. Associated with a surge of enrolled college students, universities have hired a large number of scientific personnel. Since this college expansion was policy driven, it provides us with a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of the reallocation of scientific personnel from industries to universities on firm innovation. By examining manufacturing firms’ innovation decisions in China’s 35 major cities for the period 2000-2007, we find that college expansion resulted in lower innovation propensities of manufacturing firms. Based on the Urban Household Survey data, we further confirm the channel of this crowd-out effect at the individual level. We find that, in areas where colleges expanded more rapidly, scientific personnel were less likely to choose industrial jobs, and their wage rates were higher. Last, we find that college expansion negatively influenced patent output at the city level, indicating that college expansion not only negatively influenced local firms’ innovation but also overall innovation output in the area.
