Industrial Robot Application and Enterprise Financialization: Empirical Evidence from the Chinese Manufacturing Firm Level

Financialization of manufacturing enterprises has a significant impact on the real economy, and it is a meaningful topic to study whether the large-scale application of industrial robots can inhibit the development process of manufacturing enterprises’ “depart from the virtual to the real.” Taking A-share listed manufacturing firms in 2010–2019 as a sample, the benchmark regression model is used to investigate the impact of enterprise application of industrial robots on enterprise financialization, and the impact of entity investment scale and financing constraints on the relationship between industrial robot application and enterprise financialization is also tested. The results show that the application of industrial robots significantly reduces the financialization degree of enterprises, and this impact is more obvious in private enterprises than that of state-owned enterprises. At the same time, it is also found that with the increase of enterprise equity concentration and the strengthening of the supervision of major shareholders, the negative impact of the application of industrial robots on the financialization of enterprises is becoming more and more significant. The impact on businesses in different regions is also different. In addition, a series of tests such as instrumental variable method, hysteresis variable method, and variable substitution method are used to further illustrate the robustness of the research conclusions. While this paper expands and enriches the research perspectives of industrial robot application and enterprise financialization, it also has important reference significance for the current government policies of guarding against systemic financial risks, high-quality development of the economy, and guiding the real enterprises to “depart from the virtual to the real.”