The Influence of Domestic and Foreign Institutional Blockholders on Chinese Firms’ Innovation Performance

Innovation is a challenge, particularly for emerging market firms, but can create a long-term firm value. And institutional investors and/or blockholders can play an important role in a firm's innovation activities. We examine how institutional blockholders affect Chinese firms’ innovation performance, and use the number of granted invention patents as a proxy for a firm's innovation performance. Using the panel data of 1,126 Chinese firms from 2007 to 2016, we find that institutional blockholders have a significantly positive influence on the innovation performance, since they might act as an active monitor, and alleviate managers’ career concerns. Furthermore, to investigate which type of institutional blockholders affect the performance, we categorize institutional blockholders by their national origins and investment horizons. We find further empirical results that both domestic and foreign long-term institutional blockholders promote the innovation performance. In particular, the positive effect of foreign long-term institutional blockholders is the strongest. In contrast, the effect of short-term institutional blockholders is not statistically significant. These findings are robust when we do additional tests by using both sub-samples and instrument variables.