Research on the Impact of Overseas Business Income on the Degree of Enterprise Innovation—An Empirical Analysis Based on China's A-share Listed Companies

With the continuous advancement of the internationalization of Chinese enterprises, overseas business has become an important factor affecting the innovative development of enterprises. This paper selects panel data of A-share listed companies from 2015 to 2025, adopts the two-way fixed-effects model to test the impact of overseas business income on corporate R&D investment and operating output. Multi-dimensional heterogeneity analysis is carried out from the perspectives of eastern, central and western regions, enterprise scale, coastal-inland areas, and municipalities directly under the central government and non-municipalities. Robustness tests are conducted by excluding special samples, applying 1% two-tailed winsorization, and lagging the core explanatory variable by one period. The results show that overseas business income can significantly raise the amount of corporate R&D investment and operating output, and this effect presents obvious heterogeneity, with a more prominent promoting effect on western-region and large-scale enterprises. Accordingly, this paper puts forward relevant countermeasures to provide references for the high-quality development of enterprise innovation and operation.