Research on the Effect of Executive Incentive Institutional Innovation on the Cost of Equity—Evidence From Chinese Listed Companies

Executive incentive has long been a hot topic among academics and practitioners. With the continuous development of China's manager market, the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship among executives has exerted a greater influence on corporate performance. Enterprise innovation is an important part of the entrepreneurial spirit. Moreover, China's supply-side reforms and compensation system of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been advanced and innovative. Therefore, based on the manager human capital theory and the organizational innovation theory, and using 15,492 firm-year observations from China's Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies for the period 2005–2018, we constructed various models, including the Gorden model, the Growth Rate of Price–Earnings Ratio model (PEG), the Ohlson and Juettner-Nauroth model (OJ), and the Capital Asset Pricing model (CAPM), to measure the cost of equity. We investigated the effect of the institutional innovation of executive incentives on the cost of equity, and the heterogeneous influence of China's special property rights system on the relationship between the two. We found that the innovations of the executive incentive system have a positive governance effect on the cost of equity. In particular, executive compensation incentives significantly reduce a company's equity costs. We also find that the state-owned property rights may weaken the positive effect of institutional innovation of executive incentives. Furthermore, China's executive incentives system and corporate governance mechanism are imperfect; and therefore, institutional innovation is a matter of great urgency and more innovative ideas for the manager market need to be introduced. China's listed companies should give full play to the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, constantly innovating incentive-based compensation systems of companies, and establishing a scientific and innovative concept of the cost of equity. The findings are robust after controlling for potential endogeneity concerns.