融资杠杆监管与小额贷款公司“覆盖率-可持续性”权衡——基于分层监管的准自然实验

Financial Leverage Regulation and Trade-offs between Sustainability and Outreach of Micro-credit Companies in China:Evidence from Dual-Regulation Quasi-experiment

中国自2005年试点以民间资本为主要投资者、"只贷不存"的小额贷款公司,并首次采用"中央—地方"分层监管体制。中央政府规定小额贷款公司融资杠杆率上限,部分省级政府突破这一上限,而部分省份却因受到间接监管导致融资杠杆率接近为0。本文基于2011年全国457家小额贷款公司样本数据,实证检验融资杠杆监管对小额贷款公司覆盖率、可持续性和风险行为的影响,将金融分层监管改革视作"准自然实验"以控制融资杠杆率潜在的内生性。研究发现,在当前融资杠杆监管政策下,不存在"覆盖率—可持续性"目标权衡。融资杠杆率越低和未突破融资杠杆率上限的小额贷款公司,平均贷款规模显著较大,农村贷款比例显著较低,经营可持续性和利润亦显著较低,表明融资杠杆监管政策既降低覆盖率,也损害可持续性目标。由于融资杠杆受限,小额贷款公司倾向于通过提高贷款集中度等方式追求盈利,可能会引致较大的潜在风险。

Based on the successful experiences of microfinance institutions （MFIs） in many developing countries, China started micro-credit companies （MCCs） pilot reform since 2005. The reform allows private capital to establish MCCs in rural areas to create a formal vehicle for small and micro businesses in rural areas and adopts ＂central-local＂ dual-regulation framework for the first time which can be regarded as a quasi- experiment. Under duel-regulation framework, some provincial governments break the financial leverage restriction on MCCs, although the leverage ratio set by central government is limited to 0.5. Using a nationwide dataset of 457 MCCs, we examine how the financial leverage restriction affects the trade-off between sustainability and outreach. Controlling for the possible non-random assignment of restriction via treatment effects and instrumental variables regressions, we find evidence that there is no trade-off between sustainability and outreach to small-scale borrowers and rural clients for MCCs who break the leverage restriction. However, MCCs with financial leverage less than 0.5 instead tend to reduce both profitability and outreach and are shown to be riskier with a higher loan concentration.