Abstract: This paper mainly studies how industry growth influences the incentive effect of relative performance evaluation on risk-taking. Based on whether the equity incentive plan of listed companies adopts relative performance evaluation, the explicit measure of relative performance evaluation can be obtained. With this unique data, this paper finds that when the industry growth rate is high, the relative performance evaluation of equity incentive contracts has a more significant role in promoting corporate risk-taking. The results are robust for alternative measures of risk-taking and instrumental variable estimation. Mechanism analysis shows that industry growth increases the incentive for managers to take risks to achieve assessment goals by increasing the assessment standards of relative performance evaluation. Further analysis shows that under the conditions of rapid industry growth, the relative performance evaluation promotes risk-taking, which helps enterprises increase R&D investment and improve performance, but has no significant impact on the costs of debt financing and the probability of financial distress. The results of this paper show that the economic environment will affect the incentive effect of performance evaluation methods.

Key words: relative performance evaluation, risk taking, industry growth, equity incentive