Abstract: Will CEO’s early promotion experience affect corporate innovation investment? What is the influencing mechanism in it? From the perspective of promotion experience, this paper constructs the CEO early promotion frequency index by manually searching the resumes and other information of senior executives to explore the influence of CEO promotion experience on enterprise innovation investment through static panel regression and dynamic DID analysis. The results show that the faster the CEO promotion in the early years, the more innovative investments can be promoted, and the promotion experience in the younger stage has a more significant effect. Meanwhile, this kind of influence is more significant in the non-state-owned enterprises with strong R&D intensity and weak constraint mechanism. However, the influencing mechanism between the two is CEO overconfidence, the faster the promotion is, the easier it is to become overconfidence, which can promote innovation investments.

Key words: promotion experience; promotion frequency index; innovation investment; overconfidence