This study considers whether investor-manager private meetings serve as a potential channel to detect and restrain corporate myopic R&D behavior in firmsject to earnings pressure. To do so, we exploit a unique dataset of corporate site visits, a particular form of private meetings. Our results indicate that the myopic R&D behavior of firms under earnings pressure is significantly lower when the firm hosts more institutional investors’ site visits. To further tease out the underlying mechanisms, we conduct cross-sectional analyses and find that the constraining effect of site visits is greater when there is more need for monitoring by institutional investors, i.e., when the information environment is weak and product market competition is low. Further, this monitoring effect is stronger when more questions are asked about R&D during the site visit, when the site visit involves more than one institutional investor, and when the site visit occurs earlier in the fiscal year. The main findings are robust to alternative model specifications, estimation approaches, and endogeneity issues. Overall, our evidence suggests that site visits cannot only reduce information asymmetry, but they have an important monitoring role as well.

本研究考虑投资者-经理私人会议是否可以作为发现和限制企业因盈利压力而短视的研发行为的潜在渠道。为此，我们利用了独特的企业现场访问数据集，即一种特殊形式的私人会议。我们的研究结果表明，当公司接待更多的机构投资者实地考察时，在盈利压力下的公司的短视研发行为显着降低。为了进一步梳理其背后的机制，我们进行了横截面分析，发现当机构投资者监管的需求越多，即信息环境较弱、产品市场竞争程度较低时，实地考察的约束作用就越大。 。此外，当实地考察期间询问更多有关研发的问题、当实地考察涉及多个机构投资者以及当实地考察发生在本财年早些时候时，这种监控效果会更强。主要发现对于替代模型规范、估计方法和内生性问题是稳健的。总的来说，我们的证据表明现场访问不仅可以减少信息不对称，而且还具有重要的监督作用。