关键词: 文理科教育背景, 企业创新, 双重/无偏机器学习

Abstract: At present, China’s economy is facing transformation and upgrading, and how to drive growth through innovation has attracted wide attention from the academic circles. This paper aims to provide some empirical evidence for the above view from the perspective of the impact of CEO education background differences in science & engineering and humanities & social science on firm innovation.
This paper constructs a CEO educational background database by means of database information matching and manual collection and collation, and uses double/debiased machine learning (DML) method to empirically analyze the impact of CEO professional educational background on enterprise innovation and its mechanism. The research in this paper finds that a CEO with the education background in science & engineering has a positive effect on firm innovation, compared with one with the education background in the humanities & social sciences. A CEO with the education background in science & engineering can significantly improve firm innovation. Compared with high-tech firms, the above-mentioned differences in general firms are more significant. Meanwhile, a CEO with higher education background in science & engineering has a more obvious positive impact on quality of innovation output of firms. Mechanism research further shows that a CEO with professional education background in science and engineering promote firm innovation by strengthening enterprise innovation team building, increasing the intensity of innovation investment, and improving the efficiency of innovative research and development.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows. (1)At the present stage, the impact of CEO human capital on firm innovation is being widely paid attention to from industry and academia. Some research mainly focuses on the impact of CEO education degree, personality, tenure, education background and various experiences on firm innovation. This paper systematically examines the influence of a CEO with the education background in science & engineering and one in humanities & social science on the firm innovation output quantity and output quality, and the research perspective is more comprehensive and in-depth. Meanwhile, this paper further puts forward and empirically tests the three action mechanisms, that is, a CEO with the education background in science & engineering promotes firm innovation by strengthening enterprise innovation team construction, improving the intensity of innovation investment in technology, and improving the efficiency of research and development innovation. (2)Unlike the existing literature, which usually uses traditional metrology regression models, this paper makes empirical studies using a more cutting-edge DML method. In recent years, measurement policy evaluation models in the context of machine learning drive have achieved rapid development, which is the cutting-edge approach in which the DML method was born. The DML method can effectively overcome the shortcomings of traditional linear methods. Therefore, the conclusions of this paper will be more reliable and robust.
This paper transfers the influence of professional talents from national macro level to the micro level of firm, and deeply discusses the influence of CEO education background on firm innovation and its mechanism of action. On the one hand, our findings provide new basis for the recruitment for high-level talents, to build the recruitment mechanism of executives especially CEO. On the other hand, our findings help firms to standardize the corporate governance system, improve the innovation ability of firms, and effectively promote the rapid and steady growth of the whole national economy.

Key words: science &, engineering and humanities &, social science education background, firm innovation, double/debiased machine learning