Abstract: In the latest round of nationwide sampling survey of private enterprises by five departments including the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee, the data of entrepreneurs' expectations for various risks truly reflect the individual's subjective judgment. This paper empirically tests the impact of major risk expectation on enterprise investment with this data. The research shows that the rise of entrepreneurs' major risk expectation will not only have a significant inhibitory effect on enterprise investment scale, but also worsen enterprise investment structure. The inhibitory effect on R&D investment is the strongest, followed by expansionary investment, and the inhibitory effect on non real investment is the weakest. Compared with major economic risk expectations, major social risk expectations such as natural disasters, public health and social contradictions have a greater negative impact on enterprise investment. The research on hedging mechanism shows that the government's livelihood security, enterprise crisis handling ability and entrepreneur management ability can reduce the inhibitory effect of major risk expectation on enterprise investment and reduce the negative impact on R&D investment by improving the enterprise's expectation of risk occurrence and impact, which helps to curb the deterioration of enterprise investment structure. In contrast, It has a greater hedging effect on the inhibitory effect of major social risks. With the emergence of major global social risks, it is urgent to pay attention to the prevention of major social risks. This paper not only plays an important pre-warning role in understanding the major risk expectations of enterprises in advance and carrying out active expectation intervention to stabilize enterprise investment, but also provides important policy enlightenment for the expectation correction and hedging after the occurrence of major social risks and the repair work of restraining enterprise investment afterwards.
