Human Capital, Collective Psychological Capital and Regional Innovation: Provincial Evidence from China

摘要

Technology progress is an important driving force for economic growth. Nowadays, the insufficiency of self-dependent innovation and the inefficiency of R&D staff have become two obstacles to China's technological advancement. This study focuses on the role of psychological capital and originally discusses the impact of collective psychological capital on regional innovation performance. In this study, we firstly construct a theoretical framework to describe how psychological capital impacts regional innovations through human capital. Secondly, a proxy variable is used to measure the collective psychological capital on the regional level; then, using provincial-level panel data from year 1997 to 2010, we examine the relationship among human capital, psychological capital and innovation performance with spatial panel regression method. The following empirical results are obtained: (1) Regional innovation activities have positive spatial clustering effect across China. (2) The estimated coefficient of psychological capital is also positive in innovation regressions and the results are quite robust in both OLS and spatial estimations. (3) Human capital mediates the relationship between psychological capital and innovation performance.