经济政策不确定性上升会促进中国房地产企业投资吗?——来自中国A股上市公司的经验分析

Does the Increasing Economic Policy Uncertainty Promote the Investment of Chinese Real Estate Enterprises?——Evidence from Chinese A-Share Listed Companies

现有研究发现,经济政策不确定性上升会抑制中国企业实体投资和金融化。与已有研究结论不同,本文利用A股上市房地产企业财务数据研究发现,经济政策不确定性上升会提高房地产企业实体投资和金融化程度。经济政策不确定性上升会显著提高房地产企业融资规模和投资规模。在影响渠道方面,经济政策不确定性上升会通过实物期权渠道提高实体投资和金融投资。受到房地产企业融资约束宽松的影响,金融摩擦渠道的作用并不显著。在企业金融化方面,长期股权投资、交易性金融资产、可供出售金融资产等三种资产是房地产企业金融化的主要方式。综上,经济政策不确定性上升对房地产行业的影响作用与其他行业相反,其原因在于,房地产行业在抵押品融资、地方政府支持、信息不对称等方面存在特殊性。

Existing research has found that the rising Economic Policy Uncertainty(EPU)inhibits the real investment of Chinese enterprises and the financialization of non-financial enterprises.This conclusion does not seem to hold in the real estate market.Based on the financial data of real estate enterprises listed on China’s A-share market from 2007 Q1 to 2018 Q4,this paper builds panel data regression models and finds that the rising EPU will increase the scale of real investment and the degree of financialization of real estate enterprises.The conclusions are as follows.Firstly,high EPU will significantly and robustly increase the scale of debt financing and investments of real estate enterprises.Secondly,the increase of EPU will increase the real investment and the financial investment through the real option channel.However,the financial friction channel is not significant due to the loose financing constraints in the real estate industry.Thirdly,long-term equity investment,trading financial assets,and available-for-sale financial assets are the three main methods of financialization of real estate enterprises.In summary,these conclusions are different from the literature,due to the loose financial constraints,government support and information asymmetry in the real estate industry.The marginal contribution of this paper includes the following three aspects.Firstly,focusing on the real estate industry can effectively isolate industrial noise.Although industrial fixed effect can control the differences between different industries,it does not reflect the essential difference between the real estate industry and other industries.Secondly,the differences between the real estate industry and other industries are sorted out theoretically.Through theoretical analysis,this paper finds that the real estate industry is different from other industries in financing constraints,government support,information asymmetry and price fluctuations,which makes the real estate industry show different investment and financing characteristics when facing the impact of economic policy uncertainty.Thirdly,this paper provides a foundation for preventing and resolving macro level systemic financial risk from the micro level.Different from other traditional risk studies,this paper discusses the formation mechanism of real estate market risk from the micro level of enterprises and provides reference for financial risk management from a new perspective.