The Impact of Equity Incentives on Innovation Investment Efficiency in Chinese Listed Companies—A Perspective of Agency Costs

This study selects listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets that implemented equity incentive plans during the period 2015–2023 as the base research sample. The following criteria were applied during data processing, (1) Financial firms were excluded due to their unique financial characteristics; (2) Observations with missing key variables were removed; (3) To avoid the influence of abnormal financial conditions on the results, ST and *ST firms were excluded; (4) Firms without innovation and R&D activities were deleted; (5) All continuous variables were winsorized at the 1% level on both tails to mitigate the impact of extreme values on statistical inference. After these procedures, 3,693 observations were obtained. The raw data for this study come from the CSMAR database, the Wind Financial Database, and the China Research Data Service Platform (CNRDS). Stata 17 was used for data processing and regression model estimation.