僵尸企业、退出行为和资源错配——来自中国工业企业的证据

Zombie Firms, Exit Behavior and Resource Misallocation: Evidence from China's Industrial Firms

本文使用1998—2007年中国制造业企业数据,考察了僵尸企业退出的基本特征及退出机制扭曲造成的外延型资源错配问题。研究结果表明,第一,与正常企业相比,僵尸企业的退出概率较大,低下的生产率水平与政府的企业改革政策是影响僵尸企业退出的重要因素。另外,与非国有企业相比,国有僵尸企业的退出概率较小。第二,未退出的僵尸企业以较低的融资成本占用了大量资源,资本配置的扭曲增加了正常企业的退出概率,进而导致严重的外延型资源错配。一系列稳健性检验后,上述结论仍然成立。不断深化的企业改革在清退僵尸企业中发挥了一定作用,但僵尸企业的"嗜血"性通过挤占正常企业的生存空间,扭曲企业退出机制,从而造成的外延型资源错配现象却不容忽视。因此,继续有效清理僵尸企业,尤其是国有僵尸企业,是实现目前供给侧结构性改革的关键。

Utilizing a dataset of Chinese industrial firms from 1998 to 2007,this paper finds that zombie firms,in contrast to normal firms,are more likely to exit due to their lower productivity and the effective implementation of enterprise reform policies,and the state-owned zombie firms tend to have a lower exit probability than private and foreign zombie firms.We also find that incumbent zombie firms occupy a large amount of resources with lower financing costs,resulting in serious resource misallocation by crowding out normal firms.These findings hold after several robustness checks are conducted.Current enterprise reform has played a key role in closing zombie firms,but we can't ignore the crowding out effect of zombie firms on normal firms,which distorts firms'exit strategy and leads to serious resource misallocation along the extensive margin.Therefore,effectively kicking off zombie firms,especially those state-owned zombie firms,is the key to fulfilling the supply-side structural reform.