The impact path of uncertain economic policy on the high-quality development of technology-based innovative enterprises

In recent years, macroeconomic policies have been characterized by significant uncertainty. This context of uncertainty has made it imperative to explore strategies that enterprises can adopt to pursue high-quality development. This paper specifically investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on science and technology enterprises. We categorize the productive activities of these enterprises into two types: technology-oriented and market-oriented. The paper further preprocesses the samples based on these categories. For analytical purposes, we employ the Cobb-Douglas production function to assess the level of enterprise development. A fixed-effects regression model is utilized, incorporating both control variables and mediating variables. Our baseline regression analysis reveals that the fintech coefficient for science and technology enterprises stands at 0.0721 without control variables and 0.0775 with them, demonstrating significance at the 1% level. These results suggest a positive correlation between economic policy uncertainty and the technology innovation activities of enterprises. Moreover, our findings indicate that economic uncertainty exerts a moderating effect on enterprise innovation. Specifically, the regression coefficients of economic uncertainty are -0.301, -4.687, and -3.154, while the industry characteristics regression coefficient is positive and significant at the 1% level. This pattern indicates that economic uncertainty significantly inhibits R&D investment in high-tech enterprises, adversely affecting their high-quality development. © 2024 Jing Xu, published by Sciendo.