- 期刊
Does BigTech Credit Moderate the Relationship between Trade Credit and Innovation
摘要
Increasing enterprises leverage trade credit to improve innovation performance since traditional financing instruments like bank credit are limited to enterprises, especially to small and medium-sized enterprises. Prior empirical researches engaged extensive attention on examining redistribution effect and substitution effect of trade credit. Yet the strongly positive influence of trade credit on firm innovation performance has been under-investigated. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive and objective review of research themes to investigate the promotion mechanism of trade credit on innovation performance. As trade creditors prefer to provide funding to faithful debtors, it is necessary for them to clarify the creditworthiness of debtors before they offer trade credit. BigTech credit, attained via digital technology, can play an essential role on alleviating information opacity among enterprises, and filtrates high-quality debtors for trade creditors. Thus, this study will investigate the effect of BigTech credit on trade credit provision, and shed some light on moderating effect of BigTech credit on association between trade credit and firm innovation performance. This study utilizes the panel data of listed companies in Zhejiang Province from 2013 to 2020 to explore how trade credit promote innovation performance, and the extent to which BigTech credit moderates this relationship. Zhejiang province is the birthplace of Alibaba and has abundant private companies that make high use of trade credit to support their innovation activities and apply BigTech credit to assess creditworthiness of trade debtors. The outcomes reveal that trade credit is positively relevant to innovation performance, and financial constraints serve as a mediator for the impact of trade credit on corporate creativity. In addition, this study also explores that BigTech credit plays a significantly positive moderating role on the association between trade credit and enterprise innovation performance. Nevertheless, the results also depict that BigTech credit plays different roles on core and non-core enterprises. BigTech credit proliferation will strengthen the promotion effect of trade credit on core-firm innovation performance while having no effect on non-core firm innovation performance.