政治关系、市场化程度与公司债融资——来自我国上市公司的经验证据

Political Ties,Marketization Degree,and Corporate Bond Financing:Evidence from Chinese Listed Companies

本文采取样本匹配方法，通过选取2007—2012年发行公司债的255家上市公司及其匹配公司为样本，分析了政治关系在企业公司债融资中的作用。研究结果表明，民营企业更倾向发行公司债券；无论对于国有企业还是民营企业，政治关系对企业获准发行公司债融资以及发债规模都有显著的正面影响；对于国有企业而言，政治关系对企业公司债融资的作用会随着市场化程度的提高而降低，而对于民营企业而言，由于声誉机制的存在，政治关系的作用随着市场化程度的提高被增强而非减弱。本研究有助于深化人们对公司债融资背后因素及政治关系在转型社会中的作用的理解。

The literature shows that political ties can help enterprises get the chance of IPO or bank credit. It not only happen in China, but also happen in a large number of developing countries and even in the United States. However, the existing research focuses on the effect of political connection to help the enterprise to obtain bank credit and equity financing chance. There is no research about whether political relations help enterprises to get the chance of corporate bond financing. Despite the corporate bond market is less developed in China, but the development of corporate bond is very fast since May 2007. Recently, government continue to make many policies to promote the development of corporate bond. The Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange have issued 444 corporate bonds which help enterprises get 555.24 billion RMB from September 2007 to December 2012. The total size of corporate bond finan cing was 261.48 billion which was 2. 63 times of IPO financing in 2012. With the development of China＇ s corpo rate bond market, focusing on corporate bond financing behavior is not only the necessity of enterprise develop ment, but also a contribution to the existing literatures about corporate financing constraints. This paper uses the method of sample match to study the effect of political connection on the corporate bond fi- nancing from both qualitative and quantitative perspective controlling the traditional bond issuance theory. We take 255 Chinese listed companies that issued corporate bond in market successfully during 2007 -2012 and their matching firms as sample adopting sample - match design method. There are three matching standards ： （ 1 ） the conditions of issuing corporate bond; （2） the same industry; （3） the same year. We get 3,659 observations according the three matching standards. The total sample has 3,914 observations. In order to research the different effects of political connection on SOE and private firms, we divide the total sample into SOE sample and private firm sample, then analyze the influence of political connection and regulation effect of the process of marketization. The main conclusions and creations of this paper are as follows ： （ 1 ） Private firms prefer to issue corporate bond than state -owned enterprises after controlling other traditional corporate bond issuing factors; （2） Political ties have significant positive effect on both the success of corporate bond issuing and the scale of corporate bond is- sued for state - owned enterprises and private firms. There is a significant difference between the effects of political ties in state - owned enterprises （SOEs） and in private enterprises ; （3） In addition, the effect of political ties on corporate bond issuing seems to be weakened by marketization degree for state - owned firms, while the effect seems to be strengthened for the private firms. This study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, The research enriches the literature of the corporate bond issuing theory. A lot of related theories about the corporate bond financing have established in western countries. The corporate bond financing theory is closed related with its environment and system. The financial system and capital market environment in China is very different from western developed countries. So it is necessary to study the corporate bond financing behavior of enterprises from some special perspectives in China--ownership, po- litical connection. Second, we supply the research of political connection in the area of corporate bond issuing. We find that the enterprises with political connection are more likely to issue corporate bond, and the effect of political connection seems to be strengthened by marketization degree for private firms.