Operating/Total assets Current assets - Current liabilities/total assets X12
Dividend distribution rate Dividends payable/net profit X13
Effective tax rate X14
Pay the pressure Employee compensation/operating costs X15
R&d spending R&d investment/revenue X16
2.1.1 Indicators of Profit Pressure
The requirement of maintaining profitability runs
through the whole process from listing to delisting.
Therefore, enterprises will first face profit pressure,
which comes from the difficulties in the operation
process on the one hand, and from the capital market
to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of
enterprises through earnings on the other hand.
Operating gross margin and operating net margin
are commonly used as indicators to measure the
profitability of enterprises. In terms of profit
pressure indicators, this paper first considers adding
these two indicators to measure the profitability
pressure faced by enterprises in operation.
The shell-holding pressure is a dummy variable.
The value of 0 represents the enterprise loss in the
previous year, while 1 represents the enterprise
profit in the previous year. The enterprise growth is
used to measure the pressure of profit keeping, and
the index is the growth rate of the enterprise's net
profit in the current year compared with that of the
previous year. When an enterprise has losses or other
abnormal operating conditions for two consecutive
years, it will be labeled as ST enterprise and face
delisting risk, thus affecting the financing and
enterprise value of listed enterprises. Therefore, the
enterprise will try its best to maintain the profit state,
and considering that the stock price will fluctuate
with the profit situation, it will also try its best to
increase the revenue growth rate of the enterprise.
Therefore, these two indicators are used to measure
the profit pressure of enterprises.
Secondly, the capital market can be scrutinized
from the perspective of shareholders and other
investors. The pressure of shareholders on the
enterprise can be transmitted from the two paths of
demanding profits and demanding dividends. The
profit target put forward by shareholders is not
disclosed publicly in the document. Considering the
accessibility of data, this paper considers to select
the profit target put forward by shareholders in the
public document as a measurement index. The
equity incentive plan is put forward by the enterprise
to solve the agency problem, which conveys the
profit level that the shareholders hope the enterprise
can achieve in the future. Therefore, this paper
chooses equity incentive target to measure the profit
expectation of shareholders.
Analysts focus on Pressure Measured by the
number of analysts who followed the same year,
financial analysts, as an external force, on the one
hand, will exert pressure on companies to push
management to meet analysts' profit forecasts,
resulting in "short-sighted" behavior. (Dai, 2015)
For example, the more analysts pay attention, the
more likely management is to spend less on research
and development to improve a company's short-term
performance. (Jie, 2013) And as the attention of
corporate analysts rises, so does the level of earnings
management. (Xie, 2014) On the other hand, the
higher the analysts' attention is, the more accurate
the forecast will be, which can relieve the financing
pressure of enterprises. (Fan, 2019) Therefore, this
paper chooses analysts' attention to measure the
pressure exerted on enterprises by other investors in
the capital market.
2.1.2 Payment Pressure
The income of an enterprise will eventually flow to
creditors, other stakeholders (government,
employees, etc.) and equity holders in turn, and the
final balance will be retained earnings. In the past,
more attention was paid to the financial pressure
brought by creditors. In fact, other beneficiaries
would also bring financial pressure on enterprises.
First of all, from the perspective of the creditors,
combining with the existing literature current ratio,
asset-liability ratio, market capitalization/liabilities,
working capital, liabilities, net business activities
generated cash flow/current liabilities, net business
activities generated cash flow/total liabilities six
indicators to measure the enterprise's solvency and
capital structure is reasonable.
Secondly, in practice, enterprises will respond to
financial pressure by avoiding tax, cutting r&d
expenditure and reducing employee compensation.
(Wei, 2020) Therefore, in this paper, the effective tax
rate, employee compensation and R&D expenditure
of other profit distribution items are selected to
measure the financial pressure brought by other
stakeholders.