银行部门扩张、资源配置扭曲与经济增长

Banking Sector Expansion,Resource Misallocation and Economic Growth in China

在经济模式转换和结构转型的大背景下,如何充分发挥金融体系的“效率效应”对于提升中国经济增长质量至关重要。基于2009年中小商业银行分支机构市场准入管制放松这一准自然实验,文章利用双重差分方法系统考察了银行部门扩张如何影响地区资源配置效率和经济增长。结果显示,银行部门扩张显著加剧了地区资源配置扭曲,造成了信贷供给的效率损失。作用机制检验发现,尽管银行部门扩张对企业生产率的非对称作用有助于改善资源配置,但是降低了低效率企业退出市场的概率,而这正是导致资源配置效率低下的关键原因。进一步,地区银行部门扩张显著促进了信贷规模扩张和经济增长,即信贷配置的“规模效应”比“企业间资源配置效应”更重要,符合现阶段“中国依旧处于金融抑制状态”的客观事实。此外,一个地区的市场化程度越低和行政干预越多,银行部门扩张的资源配置扭曲效应越强且经济增长效应越弱。文章的结论表明,在放松市场准入管制以充分发挥银行部门的信贷配置功能时,需要特别关注信贷资金的配置效率。

Considering that the traditional capital-driven growth mode becomes unsustainable after China enters the“new normal”stage in 2012,it is of great significance to achieve innovation-driven growth mode.As an important part of a country’s economy,the financial sector promotes economic growth by absorbing idle funds and taking advantage of scale economies.Generally speaking,the credit allocation function can be classified into two categories:one is the quantity effect that accelerates physical capital accumulation;another is the efficiency effect that improves total factor productivity.Hence,it is crucial to exploit the efficiency effect of the financial system to improve the quality of China’s economic growth.By utilizing the 2009 bank deregulation on small-and medium-sized commercial banks as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper examines how banking sector expansion affects resource allocation and economic growth using the difference-in-differences(DID)method.The empirical results show that banking sector expansion significantly deteriorates resource allocation efficiency,leading to potential loss on credit supply.Moreover,although banking sector expansion improves resource allocation via asymmetric effects on firm productivity,it reduces the probability of firms with lower productivity exiting the market,which dominates the resource allocation effect of banking sector expansion.Further,banking sector expansion significantly promotes credit scale and economic growth.More specifically,the credit scale effect is more predominant than the resource allocation effect,which is consistent with the status of financial repression in China.In addition,the negative(positive)effect of banking sector expansion on resource allocation efficiency(economic growth)is stronger for cities with lower(higher)marketization degree and more(less)government interventions.Our findings have importantly implications:First,market-oriented banking reform is effective on the whole and should be continuously strengthened.Second,in addition to strengthening the scale effect of credit,the important direction of China’s banking reform should shift to the effect of credit reallocation,i.e.,guiding more credit to productive enterprises.Third,to make full use of the market’s resource allocation function,it is remarkable to build a good market environment and reduce administrative intervention.This paper relates to the literature in three ways:First,while previous studies investigate how banking sector expansion affects firms’financial constraints and productivity,our study focuses on its effects on resource allocation efficiency and economic growth.Second,even though a plenty of previous studies explore how the market structure and competition of banking industry affect economic growth and firms’investment and financing decisions,little is known about the effect of the bank deregulation implemented in 2009,and our study fills this gap.Third,given that there is potential endogeneity in the existing literature when they commonly use OLS and GMM estimators,we design a DID estimation to identify causality.