数字金融与中小企业融资可得性——来自银行贷款的微观证据

Digital Finance and the Access to Credit for SMEs——Evidence from Bank Lending

数字金融作为金融业发展的新业态,有助于缓解银企之间的信息不对称,从而提高中小企业的贷款可得性。本文在构建包含新型金融科技与传统金融的信贷市场理论模型的基础上,利用银行贷款数据,从银企信息不对称视角实证检验数字金融对中小企业融资可得性的影响。本文发现,数字金融发展显著增加了中小企业贷款金额,降低了中小企业贷款利率。机制分析表明,数字金融发展显著增加了中小企业信用担保的比例,且贷款违约率下降。数字金融发挥作用的途径主要依赖于金融科技公司与银行之间的合作而非竞争。进一步分析显示,线上经营的企业更容易在数字金融的帮助下获得银行贷款,但其贷款额度的增加挤出了一部分线下经营企业的贷款。本文研究表明,数字金融通过促进金融科技公司与银行合作,提高了中小企业融资可得性。但是,几乎没有数字禀赋的中小企业面临被边缘化的风险。因此,银行业在利用数字金融的同时,也要积极推动中小企业数字化转型。

Digital finance, as a new business model for financial sector development, helps to alleviate the information asymmetry between banks and enterprises, thus improving the access to credit for SMEs. Based on a credit market model constructed at the theoretical level and the loan tracking data of banks, this paper empirically examines the impact of digital inclusive finance on the access to credit for SMEs from the perspective of bank-enterprise information asymmetry. This paper finds that the development of digital inclusive finance significantly increases the loan amount of SMEs and reduces the interest rate of loans of SMEs. Mechanism analysis shows that digital inclusive finance development significantly increases the number of SME credit guarantees and decreases the loan default rates. The way in which digital inclusive finance works relies heavily on the cooperation rather than the competition between digital financial institutions and banks. Further analysis shows that firms operating online are more likely to obtain bank loans with the help of digital finance, however, their increased loan amount squeezes out a portion of the loan amount from firms operating offline. This paper shows that digital finance improves the access to financing for SMEs by working with banks. However, SMEs with little or no digital endowment face the risk of being marginalized. Therefore, the banking industry should actively promote the digital transformation of SMEs while promoting digital finance.