银行结构性竞争与企业投资效率——基于中国工业企业数据的实证研究

Banking Structural Competition and Firms’Investment Efficiency:Empirical Analysis Based on Chinese Industrial Firm Data

文章采用2005-2013年中国工业企业数据和省级商业银行金融许可证数据,分析了银行市场结构性竞争对企业投资效率的影响。研究发现,加强银行竞争能够提高工业企业投资效率。对于固定资产占比较低的工业企业,银行竞争更能改善其投资不足;而对于固定资产占比较高的工业企业,银行竞争则更能缓解其投资过度。在一系列稳健性检验后,上述研究结论依然成立。进一步研究发现,2007年《物权法》实施后,银行竞争对工业企业投资效率的提升作用更强;对于产权性质和所处地区不同的企业,银行竞争提升投资效率的作用存在显著差异。文章研究表明,随着银行竞争的增强,银行能够有效评价企业的主要贷款抵押物-固定资产,从而发挥更好的融资作用和监督作用。

Bank loans are firms’main external financing channel in China.Therefore,banking structural change has a great effect on firms’behavior.CBIRC has published a series of policies that deregulate banking markets,which provides opportunities for small and medium-size banks’rapid development.Compared to monopoly lending markets,competitive lending markets can better alleviate small and medium-sized firms’financing difficulties.Among China’s banking loans,mortgage loan is the most popular.Fixed assets are firms’important mortgages of bank loans.Therefore,banks can use mortgages to evaluate firms’loan risk and make decisions accordingly.Existing research shows that banking competition can ease firms’financial constraints.However,under the circumstance of financial markets in China’s transition economy,whether the increasing banking competition can improve the governance effect of bank loans on firms’investments is not clear.Therefore,to analyze how changing banking competition affects firms’investments is of great significance to improve financial resource allocation efficiency and enhance financial service to the real economy.Under this condition,this paper uses banks’financial license data provided by CBIRC to construct provincial banking structural competition change measure,and analyze how the change affects provincial industrial firms’investment efficiency.We find that increasing banking structural competition can improve industrial firms’investment efficiency,including both underinvestment and overinvestment.In addition,for firms with lower(higher)fixed assets ratio,banking competition is more likely to modify firms’underinvestment(overinvestment).Further analysis shows that after the enactment of China Property Law in 2007,the effects of banking structural competition on firms’investment efficiency are more significant.Overall,the results indicate that,increasing banking structural competition can improve banks’evaluation of firms’fixed assets,and further increase firms’investment efficiency through the financing channel.This paper has several contributions:Firstly,most researches on the banking structure and firms’behaviors are from the financing prospective.This paper analyzes how banking structural competition affects firms’investment efficiency,which can further testify the impact of financial environment on firms’resource allocation efficiency.Secondly,the results show that,fixed assets,as mortgagees,provide an important transmission role in the effect of banking structural competition on firms’investment efficiency,which further shows the influencing mechanism of financial supply-side structural reform on the real economy.Thirdly,this paper shows that better financial market structure can have a good governance effect on the real economy and improve resource allocation efficiency.With China’s deepening financial supply-side structural reform,analyzing how financial reform affects the real economy and the corresponding mechanism can provide policy suggestions on how to improve financial services to the real economy and prevent financial systematic risks.