债务约束对企业“脱实向虚”的治理效果研究

Evaluating the Governance Role of Debt Constraints on Enterprises’ Over-financialization

本文利用企业负债水平表征债务约束力强弱,以2007-2018年中国实体部门上市企业作为研究样本,从企业金融资产持有“规模”和“结构”两个维度,考察债务约束在抑制企业“脱实向虚”方面所起的作用。研究发现:第一,从规模上看,债务约束明显地抑制了企业金融资产持有规模,主要表现在现金类金融资产上;从结构上看,债务约束驱动企业提高了风险类金融资产的相对比重,债权治理未能发挥有效的治理功能。第二,相较于短期负债与银行贷款,长期负债以及因商业信用而形成的负债对企业金融资产持有表现出更优的治理效应。第三,因国有企业面临更为严重的“债务软约束”问题和较低的外部盈利压力,国有产权属性会明显弱化债务约束与企业金融资产持有之间的关系。第四,当外部盈利压力和产品市场竞争压力较高时,债务约束对企业风险类金融资产持有规模的抑制效应变弱,对企业增加风险类金融资产持有比重的驱动作用增强。本文研究为防范实体企业“脱实向虚”和完善负债的相机治理机制提供了有益参考。

In recent years, China’s economy has been experiencing an obvious problem of over-financialization, which has attracted widespread attention from policy makers, scholars and market practitioners as well. One of the important manifestations is that the scale of financial assets held by non-financial enterprises has increased rapidly. Against this background, many Chinese scholars have carried out a lot of research on driving factors and crowding-out effects of enterprises’ over-financialization. However, from the micro perspectives of scale and structure of enterprises’ financial asset holdings, there is very little literature discussing the governance mechanism of this issue. The contingent governance role of debt financing is one of the most concerned micro-governance mechanisms. This paper takes debt governance as the entry point to investigate its role in restraining enterprises’ over-financialization?Theoretical speaking, if the debt governance mechanism is effective, the increase of financial leverage intensifies the financial constraints faced by managers, which would encourage managers to allocate investment to projects that are beneficial for the long-term development of enterprises, reduce the scale of financial assets holdings, and restrain enterprises’ over-financialization. However, due to the soft budget constraints of bank loans and the profitability pressure from the capital market in China, managers faced with debt repayment pressure also have the motivation to increase financial investment in order to maintain short-term profits and prevent stock prices from being undervalued. When the two forces mentioned above exist at the same time, debt constraints may help to limit the scale of financial asset held by enterprises, but they can also drive enterprises to change the structure of financial asset holdings and increase the proportion financial assets with higher risk and return.To throw light on the relationship between debt constraints and enterprises’ over-financialization, this paper takes the listed enterprises in China’s real sector from 2007 to 2018 as the research sample and examines whether debt constraints can effectively restrain enterprises’ financialization.(1) Debt financing obviously restrains the scale of financial asset holdings. However, from the perspective of the structure of financial assets, debt constraints drive enterprises to increase the proportion of risky financial assets, and the mechanism of debt governance is ineffective.(2) Compared with short-term liabilities and bank loans, long-term liabilities and liabilities formed by commercial credit show better governance effects on enterprises’ financial asset holdings.(3) As state-owned enterprises(SOEs) face more severe soft debt constraints and lower external profitability pressures, the state-owned property rights will obviously weaken the relationship between debt constraints and financial asset holdings.(4) Under an environment of high profitability pressure and intense competition in the product market, the restraining effect of debt constraints on the scale of enterprises’ financial assets holdings would be weakened, while the positive impact of debt constraints on increasing the proportion of risky financial assets holdings would be enhanced. This paper provides a useful reference for preventing real economy-based enterprises’ over-financialization and improving the contingent debt governance mechanism.The contributions of this paper are reflected in following aspects. Firstly, we examine the real effect of debt constraints in China from the perspective of enterprises’ financial asset holding behavior, which enriches literature on the role of contingent debt governance.We find that debt constraints have a heterogeneous impact on the scale and structure of enterprises’ financial asset holdings if the listed enterprises are faced with soft debt constraints and high external profitability pressures. Therefore, we believe that it is very necessary to improve the binding force of bank credit and enhance the role of banks in corporate governance. Secondly, based on system GMM estimation, IV estimation, and quasi-natural experiment of China’s deregulation of the lowest loan interest rates, we construct a difference-in-differences(DID) model and verify the robustness of our results by mitigating the endogenous problems in the econometric model. Finally, this paper further investigates the moderating effect of debt structure, the nature of enterprise ownership,external profitability pressure and product market competition on the relationship between debt constraints and enterprises’ financial asset holding behavior. It further enriches research on the corporate governance effect of debt constraints and debt structure. The corresponding theoretical analysis and empirical evidence have strong policy value on how to use and improve the contingent debt governance mechanism in the process of deleveraging to prevent enterprises’ over-financialization.