The effect of the revision of intangible assets accounting standards on enterprise technology innovation

Against the institutional background of building an innovative country, this article constructs the influence mechanism of the accounting standards for intangible assets for enterprise technology innovation. We select panel data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2002 to 2015. We focus on the two dimensions of innovation input and innovation output and use Poisson regression, negative binomial regression, zero expansion regression, and other methods to examine the effects of the revision of the intangible assets accounting standards on enterprise technology innovation. Our research reveals the following: (1) In general, the revision of the intangible assets accounting standards can promote enterprises’ technological innovation activities; (2) This effect is heterogeneous by ownership: before the revision of accounting standards for intangible assets, state-owned enterprises had more innovation input than non-state-owned enterprises, but the innovation output of non-state-owned enterprises has become greater than that of state-owned enterprises even though the policy only significantly improved the innovation output of the latter; and (3) The system lacks a continuous effect. The revision of the intangible assets accounting standards has only a one-year lag effect on the incentive effect of enterprise innovation input activities, mainly because enterprise innovation input has only a one- to two-year lag effect on output. The implementation of this system has not changed the status quo that Chinese patent rights are based on applied short-term technology research and development. Based on the findings, this article proposes some pertinent policy suggestions.