| 梁若冰,胡文君,刘睿蕾,汤韵.从规则制定到空间重构：企业参与行业标准制定对跨区域投资的影响[J].数量经济技术经济研究,2026,(5):158-181 | | 从规则制定到空间重构：企业参与行业标准制定对跨区域投资的影响 | | From Rulemaking to Spatial Restructuring: The Impact of Enterprise Participation in Industry Standard Setting on Cross-regional Investment | | | | DOI： | | 中文关键词: 行业标准 企业标准化 异地投资 组织边界理论 | | 英文关键词: Industry Standards Corporate Standardization Cross-regional Investment Theory of Organizational Boundaries | | 基金项目: | | | 中文摘要: | | 企业在依托跨区域设立子公司实现边界扩张时，实质上面临内部组织成本与外部交易成本的权衡。本文考察了企业参与行业标准制定对两类成本及异地投资决策的影响。研究发现，参与行业标准制定显著促进了企业的异地投资。机制分析表明，该效应主要源于内部组织管理的优化，通过降低人力成本、提升劳动配置效率及强化质量控制能力，降低了跨区域经营的组织成本；外部市场交易成本并未因标准制定发生显著变化。异质性分析显示，行业标准制定对成熟期企业及高管理费用企业的异地投资推动作用更为突出。此外，异地客户与供应商能够替代子公司的市场开拓与供应链管理职能，降低了企业通过内部化方式设立异地子公司的必要性。并且，标准主导企业在跨区域扩张中对跟随企业存在明显的挤出效应。本文首次将标准化活动纳入企业边界理论框架，既为理解企业参与标准制定如何驱动异地投资提供了新视角，也为“十五五”规划下坚决破除全国统一大市场建设卡点堵点、加快完善要素市场化配置体制机制提供了微观层面的实证依据。 | | 英文摘要: | | In the context of globalization and the accelerated flow of production factors, cross-regional allocation of capital is a significant driver of economic growth. Firms, as the primary carriers of capital mobility, expand their boundaries mainly by establishing subsidiaries in different regions. According to the internalization theory, firms can reduce external transaction costs, such as search, bargaining, and monitoring costs, by internalizing activities that would otherwise occur in external markets by establishing geographically dispersed subsidiaries. However, establishing subsidiaries across regions also increases organizational management burdens, including coordination costs, agency problems, and cultural frictions. Therefore, the expansion of firm boundaries depends on the relative changes between market transaction costs and organizational costs.Currently, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly emphasizes the need to “resolutely remove obstacles impeding the construction of a unified national market,” highlighting the critical role of “unifying the fundamental institutional rules of the market.” Industry standards, as uniform technical norms and market rules, provide a common “technical language” for cross-regional investment (CRI). By enhancing internal consistency in areas such as human resource management, quality control, information transmission, and cultural norms, industry standards strengthen firms’ ability to efficiently replicate existing business models across different regions. Therefore, industry standards have increasingly become an essential institutional foundation for promoting factor market integration and improving the efficiency of cross-regional resource allocation.This study empirically examines how a firm’s participation in industry standard setting affects both its organizational and market transaction costs and, in turn, its decisions regarding CRI. The results indicate that participation in industry standard setting significantly facilitates firms’ investments in other regions. Mechanism analysis reveals that this effect primarily stems from the optimization of internal organizational management, including reductions in labor costs, improvements in workforce allocation efficiency, and enhanced quality control capabilities, while external market transaction costs do not change significantly because of standard setting. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promoting effect of standard setting on CRI is more pronounced for firms in mature stages or those with higher management expenses. Moreover, geographically dispersed customers and suppliers can partially substitute for the market development and supply chain management functions of subsidiaries, reducing the necessity of internalizing external transaction costs and thereby lowering the need to establish subsidiaries. Further analysis demonstrates that firms leading standard-setting activities exert a clear crowding-out effect on follower firms’ CRIs.This study contributes to the literature in three main ways. First, regarding research perspective, it enriches our understanding of factors influencing firms’ CRIs. Existing studies have mainly explained such investment behavior from the perspectives of transportation infrastructure, fiscal incentives, informal institutions, and technological progress. This is a novel study to examine it from the perspective of firm participation in industry standard setting. In addition, it extends research on the economic effects of firm involvement in standardization. Due to data limitations, prior research has primarily focused on firms as passive adopters of standards. Although some recent studies have begun to explore firms’ proactive role in standard-setting, the implications for cross-regional market expansion remain unexplored. This study bridges these two research streams by linking firm standardization activities with CRI behavior.Second, theoretically, this study integrates industry standard setting into the firm boundary framework for the first time, constructing a systematic analytical model of “standard setting-internal organizational and external transaction costs-CRI.” This provides a novel theoretical perspective for understanding how participation in standardization activities influences firms’ geographical expansion.Third, in practical terms, industry standards have significant implications at both the firm and national levels. For firms, participation in industry standard setting has a marked effect on internal governance, fostering consistency in human resource management, quality control, information transmission, and cultural norms, thereby effectively reducing organizational costs and facilitating boundary expansion. At the national level, the development and promotion of a unified standardization system enhances the efficient allocation of various resources and plays a critical role in weakening regional barriers and mitigating market segmentation. This function aligns closely with the national policy objective of accelerating the construction of a unified national market. | | 查看全文 |
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