关键词: 引导基金, 高管团队特征, fsQCA

Abstract: The Government Guiding Fund is set up by the Chinese government to alleviate the financing constraint of firms, especially in the early stages of the development of small and medium-sized high-tech enterprises. However, in reality, the Guiding Funds have been criticized in the market for not investing in high-tech companies, but focusing on traditional industries. Taking the data of 174 Guiding Funds, this paper considers the fundraising ability and investment frequency of the Government Guiding Fund as scenarios and uses the fsQCA method to examine how the different configurations of top management team members' gender, overseas study or work experience, STEM background, and political connection conditions affect the Guiding Funds investment decision. Thus, from the perspective of configuration, this paper investigates what kind of Government Guiding Funds' top management teams tend to invest more in high-technology firms. The results show that a single characteristic element of the top management team of the Government Guiding Funds does not constitute a necessary condition for investment in high-tech firms. There are four configurations for the Government Guiding Funds to invest in high-tech enterprises, namely female management member-driven configuration, local management member-driven configuration, fundraising & investment-driven configuration, and STEM member & political connection-driven configuration. The female management member-driven configuration indicates that the Guiding Funds with a high proportion of female executives and high investment frequency tend to invest in high-tech companies. The local management member-driven configuration supports the Guiding Funds with a low proportion of executives with overseas working or education experience and a low proportion of executives with political connections as well as high investment frequency to invest more in high-tech companies. Fundraising & investment-driven configuration explains the fact that as long as the Guiding Funds raise enough funds and the investment frequency is high enough, the composition of the top management team will not affect the funds' investment decision in high-tech enterprises. The political connection-driven configuration shows that the political connections also affect the investment decision of Guiding Funds. The funds with a high percentage of STEM background members and political connections have a high tendency to invest in high-tech target firms. The results remain robust after several robustness checks. After adjusting the frequency threshold, consistency threshold, and PRI consistency threshold, respectively, and taking the fundraising ability as a major condition in all configurations, the four final configurations remain robust. The four different driving configurations show that different from the result of traditional linear regression analysis, the combination of multiple elements can achieve the same result, and there is not only one way to promote the Guiding Funds to invest more in high-tech enterprises. When the investment frequency of the fund is high enough, various executive configurations can drive the Guiding Funds to invest in high-tech target enterprises. The research results support the idea that different characteristic configurations of the Guiding Funds’ top management team can all have a tendency to invest in high-tech enterprises and thus provide a new research perspective and decision-making basis for the construction of the Guiding Fund top management team.