摘要
中小企业融资是党中央以及社会各界长期以来关注的热点问题。本文将县级地方政府融资平台名单与2006—2011年县级金融机构贷款数据进行匹配,利用不同县域成立地方政府融资平台时间的差异构造双重差分模型,首次从实证上发现了地方政府融资平台成立对县域中小企业贷款的挤出效应。研究发现,地方政府融资平台成立将会显著降低国有大型商业银行发放的中小企业贷款,但不会影响农村金融机构的中小企业贷款。进一步分析表明,地方政府融资平台成立提高了县域固定资产投资强度,但未能在短期内带来经济产出的显著提升。本文的实证结果表明,地方政府融资能够通过挤出中小企业贷款这一渠道对整个经济体系的资源配置产生影响。本文的发现对今后一个时期有效缓解中小企业融资难问题和进一步深化地方政府债务治理具有重要意义。
The dilemma of financing China's small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs)has been hotly debated in academic and policy circles.The literature has mainly focused on the supply-side characteristics of China's lending market to explain the predicament of SME financing.As China's financial system is still relatively underdeveloped,firms,especially SMEs,are heavily reliant on the indirect financing channel,such as banking loans.However,China's banking system is dominated by state-owned large commercial banks.A substantial body of literature has demonstrated that large banks have disadvantages in financing SMEs.Despite the importance of this subject,few empirical studies have used disaggregated county-level data to derive credible inferences on the demand-side causes of the stagnant growth of SME loans in China.Furthermore,China's local governments are closely connected to the financial system,and local governments face strong incentives to invest in infrastructure construction programs.However,China's Budget Law,enacted in 1994,strictly prohibited local governments from raising debt until 2015.In response,local governments established Local Government Financing Platforms(LGFPs)to circumvent this legal restriction.Specifically,a local government injects land reserves or future land sale revenues into an LGFP as collateral to raise debt financing through the banks.In a typical arrangement,an LGFP also carries either explicit or implicit guarantees from its affiliated local government.Even more importantly,the loan decisions of China's large state-owned banks are,to varying degrees,subject to intervention from local governments.Therefore,the LGFPs have absolute advantages over SMEs in the lending market.Based on the long-standing observations documented above,we propose the following research hypothesis:that the establishment of China's LGFPs may have had crowding-out effects on regional SME loans,especially SME loans from state-owned large banks.Our sample combines the LGFP name list and detailed county-level bank loan data from 2006 to 2011 obtained from the China Banking and Regulatory Commission.We use a standard difference-in-differences strategy to identify the effects of county-level LGFP establishment on the growth of SME loans.In practice,we define a county's treatment status according to whether it established an LGFP for the first time.We control for a flexible time trend varying by a full set of pre-determined county attributes,including the level of development,market size,degrees of financial deepening,and natural conditions,and several crucial time-varying prefectural-level and county-level covariates.Our main results suggest that the establishment of the LGFPs significantly reduced the SME loans of China's state-owned large commercial banks.The results of the event study reveal that the SME loans of the treatment and control group counties generally evolve in a parallel before the establishment of the LGFPs.This finding is highly robust to alternative specifications and survives a placebo test using a randomly assigned false treatment time.In contrast,we do not observe a significant crowding-out effect on the SME loans of China's small banks.We also find that the establishment of an LGFP is associated with a decrease in the non-performing loans of state-owned large commercial banks.Given China's strict financial regulation of banks' non-performing loan ratio,this finding helps to rationalize why LGFP loans are sought after in China's lending market.In sum,our findings indicate that the allocation of financial resources from SMEs to LGFPs fails to promote regional economic performance in the short run.This paper reveals the crowding-out effects of China's local governmental debt boom on SME loans in the lending market.Our insights have important policy implications.Notably,although the Chinese central government has prohibited local governments from directly borrowing from the banking system through LGFPs in recent years,local governments still manage to use debt to finance their infrastructure projects,albeit through the shadow banking channel and thus with higher borrowing costs and less transparency.Our paper highlights the potential side effects of China's local governmental debt boom on the real economy.
作者
刘畅
曹光宇
马光荣
LIU Chang;CAO Guangyu;MA Guangrong(Princeton University;The Chinese University of Hong Kong,Shenzhen;Peking University;Renmin University of China)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2020年第3期50-64,共15页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金面上项目(71773125,71973002,71973142)
重点项目(71533006)的资助。
关键词
中小企业贷款
地方政府融资平台
挤出效应
国有大型商业银行
Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Loan
Local Government Financing Platform
Crowding-out Effect
State-owned Large Commercial Bank
作者简介
刘畅,电子信箱:cl44@princeton.edu;曹光宇,电子信箱:cgy1117@pku.edu.cn;通讯作者:马光荣,电子信箱:grma@ruc.edu.cn。
