创新是国家经济增长的源泉，也是企业保持国际竞争力的关键。新世纪以来，中国企业积极参与到对外直接投资活动中，很重要的动机在于获取国际领先的创新资源，以促进自身的创新发展。企业进行对外直接投资时，需要在绿地投资或是海外并购等模式中进行选择，不同投资模式将通过不同途径影响企业表现。当前，对外直接投资对跨国公司绩效的影响已被学术界广泛讨论，也有不少研究探讨了影响企业对外直接投资模式的因素。然而，在对外投资模式如何影响企业表现的问题上，现有文献仍缺乏证据。

为此，本研究从理论和实证两方面，探讨了对外直接投资模式与企业创新的关系。理论层面，本研究详细梳理了对外直接投资模式影响的相关文献，并提出不同投资模式对企业创新的潜在影响途径；实证层面，本研究以2008~2017年中国A股非金融类上市公司为样本，创造性地利用上市企业海外关联交易数据库结合详尽的手动搜集和匹配，构造出一个包含跨国公司对外直接投资模式和海外子公司信息的独特数据库。以企业专利申请总数和发明专利申请数作为企业创新的代理变量，使用PSM-DID、中介效应模型和三重差分法等模型，研究了对外直接投资模式对企业创新能力的影响。

本研究有以下发现：（1）中国上市公司进行对外直接投资整体上显著提升了企业的创新能力，不同投资模式对企业的创新能力影响存在差异；（2）区分企业投资模式看，仅进行绿地投资对企业的发明专利申请数有较为显著的提升作用，而仅进行海外并购将对企业的专利申请总数产生显著影响；对于采取两种投资模式的混合投资企业，对外直接投资对创新能力的影响最大；（3）整体上看，企业境外子公司数目对其创新能力有显著的正向影响。第一次的绿地投资对企业创新能力的作用更强，而仅进行一次海外并购不利于企业的创新发展；（4）使用企业海外经营收入和研发投入作为中介变量，本研究发现，绿地投资主要是通过提升企业研发投入的机制提升企业的创新水平，但海外并购并未通过上述两种渠道影响企业创新表现；（5）国有企业的性质将显著提升企业的创新能力，但国有企业进行绿地投资对创新的影响与非国有企业没有明显差别。

Innovation capability is the source of economy growth, it’s also the key for a company to keep its international competitiveness. Since the 21th century, China has experienced a new round of rapid growth in its outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) activities. Many Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs), when going abroad, are motivated by accessing advanced innovation resources in the world, so as to promote their own innovation capabilities. These MNEs need to make decisions between greenfield investment and overseas merge and acquisition (M&A), which we called establishment modes in literature. MNE’s establishment modes will affect its performance through different mechanisms. At present, a large number of literatures have investigated the relationship between OFDI and MNEs’ performance, the determinants of establishments modes have been fully discussed as well. However, evidence on how different establishment modes would affect firm’s performance is still limited.

Therefore, the aim of this research is to contribute to the literature of OFDI establishment modes by investigating their subsequent outcomes. To be more specifically, this paper will investigate the relationship between OFDI establishment modes and firm’s innovation performance, which is measured as the number of firm’s patent application, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. On the one hand, this study collects related literature on MNE’s establishment modes and their outcomes, and indicates their potential mechanisms; On the other hand, using the sample of Chinese listed enterprises over the period 2008~2017, this study has developed a unique dataset by combining the MNEs’ overseas related party transactions information and manual search to give empirical evidence. This paper employs propensity score method (PSM) with difference-in-difference (DID) to examine the causal effects of different OFDI establishment modes. Also, the difference-in-difference-in-difference (DDD) approaches and mediation analysis will be used to test the potential mechanisms of the impacts of different establishment modes.

This study has the following findings: (1) In general, the outward foreign direct investment activities significantly improve MNE’s innovation capability, the influence varies in different OFDI establishment modes; (2) MNE’s invention patent application will increase significantly when it only conduct greenfield investment, while its total patent application will experience a significant growth when it only conduct overseas M&A, firm which conducts both of these two types of OFDI benefits the most; (3) In general, the number of firm’s overseas subsidiaries has a positive impact on its innovation capability. Firm’s first greenfield investment has a bigger impact on its performance, while OFDI activity contains negative influence on firm’s innovation capability when it only has one overseas M&A subsidiaries; (4) using international sales and R&D spending as the mediators, this study indicates that greenfield investment mainly promotes firm’s innovation capability by increasing its research and development (R&D) spending, while overseas M&A does not affect firm’s innovation capability through the aforementioned mechanisms; (5) firms with state-owned ownership leads to more patent applications, however, state-owned enterprise (SOE) does not show their innovation premium than non-SOE when going abroad.