Stakeholder interest to mitigate the agency problem in enterprise innovation and the moderating effect of ownership concentration and financial constraints

This paper first studies the impact of stakeholder interest on the agency problem by selecting different proxies for key measurements from companies listed on second-board markets from 2013 to 2019 to investigate the effect of the equity incentive on companies' innovation levels. In addition, this paper adds two moderating variables, ownership concentration and financing constraints, to analyse their moderating effects on the relationships between equity incentives and enterprise innovation. The empirical results show a significant positive correlation between equity incentives and the level of corporate innovation output. In addition, a high degree of ownership concentration can strengthen the positive promoting effect of equity incentives on a company's innovation output. However, when a company faces financing constraints, the promotion effect of equity incentives on the company's innovation will be restrained. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.