银行竞争的微观效应:来自融资约束的经验证据

Microeconomic Effects of Bank Competition: Evidence from Corporate Financial Constraints

银行竞争的加剧将促使银行更多地搜集和挖掘企业信息,降低银企之间的信息不对称,进而缓解企业融资约束。为此,本文在构建理论模型分析的基础上,进一步实证检验了这一假定。实证检验结果表明,银行竞争显著降低了企业投资-现金流敏感性,即缓解了企业融资约束;该结论在控制内生性问题,以及采用不同银行竞争指标和融资约束指标进行稳健性检验后仍旧成立。同时,本文还发现,银行竞争降低了企业债务融资成本,从而为银行竞争降低企业融资约束这一结论提供了补充性证据。进一步地,在企业信息不对称程度更严重的情况下,银行竞争缓解企业融资约束的作用更大,且银行竞争能够降低企业贷款的交易成本,从而为银行竞争降低融资约束的作用机制提供了证据支持。本文不仅丰富了银行竞争的经济后果以及融资约束等相关领域文献,同时还具有较为重要的政策含义。

Bank competition in China has increased dramatically over the last few decades.While the Chinese banking industry in the early 1980s comprised only four commercial banks with separate specializations,both the number and scale of banks in China have grown rapidly since then.Banks now also play an increasing role in China's economy and the government attaches great importance to them.Specifically,the government encourages banks to help alleviate corporate financial difficulties to support the development of the real economy.However,no studies have yet examined how bank competition affects the financial constraints faced by most firms,and how these effects vary across different firms.Information asymmetry is an important factor leading to corporate financial constraints(Fazzari et al.,1988;Kaplan&Zingales,1997).In this paper,we hypothesize that increased bank competition lowers information asymmetry between banks and firms,thus alleviating corporate financial constraints.Banks have to compete with each other for qualified borrowers,especially as bank competition grows fiercer(Huang&Xiong,2005;Ma et al.,2013).However,a bank that wins customers may run into the“winner s curse”(Shaffer,1998).In a highly competitive banking industry,banks with insufficient and asymmetrical information on their customers(i.e.,borrowers)may unintentionally win unqualified customers,and thus lose profits(Broecker,1990;Rajan,1992).To prevent this and make the right choice,banks make more effort to gather and uncover corporate information.Moreover,to earn a profit in a highly competitive banking industry with lower profit margins(Petersen&Rajan,1995),banks need to gather more information on firms to make more appropriate credit decisions.Hence,bank competition creates strong incentives for banks to gather corporate information,thus reducing the information asymmetry between banks and firms and alleviating corporate financial constraints.To examine our prediction that bank competition helps to alleviate corporate financial constraints,we first construct a theoretical model to analyze our conjecture and examine it empirically.Using a large sample of commercial banks and all Chinese A-share listed firms from 2000 to 2014,we find that bank competition significantly reduces the investment-cash flow sensitivity of firms,which means that bank competition can reduce firm financial constraints.These results hold after controlling for endogeneity concerns and substituting an alternative measure for financial constraints.Furthermore,we show that bank competition reduces the cost of corporate debt financing,providing supplementary evidence that bank competition reduces corporate financial constraints.We also find that the alleviating effects of bank competition on corporate financial constraints are greater when firms face more severe information asymmetry.In addition,bank competition reduces the transaction costs of bank loans raised by firms.Our paper makes two main contributes to the literature.First,while the literature focuses mainly on how bank competition affects the macro-economy(Berger&Hannan,1989;Carlin&Mayer,2003),we provide new evidence on how bank competition influences individual firms.Although some studies have examined the effect of bank competition on corporate access to finance(Bonaccorsi Di Patti&Dell Ariccia,2004;Chong et al.,2013;Love&Peria,2014),their conclusions are inconsistent on this issue(Zazutskie,2006;De Guevara&Maudos,2011)and do not directly address how bank competition affects corporate financial constraints.Second,we contribute to the literature on financial constraints.From the perspective of funding demands,the literature has mainly studied how firm characteristics and behavior affect firm financial constraints(Custódio&Metzger,2014;Erel et al.,2015;Deng&Zeng,2011;Yu et al.,2012).Few studies have examined how financial market development and liberalization may alleviate corporate financial constraints(Love,2003;Shen et al.,2010),and none have investigated how the structure of the banking industry influences the financial constraints of individual firms.