地方政府债券对城投债券发行规模与定价的影响

The Effect of Local Government Bonds on the Issuance and Pricing of Municipal Corporate Bonds

本文沿着防控地方政府债务风险的核心思路——“开前门、堵后门”,考察了2015年新《预算法》实施后地方政府债券规模扩张与结构调整对城投债券发行与定价的影响。实证结果表明,从总量上来看,地方政府债券规模的扩张并未抑制城投债券的融资需求,反而为偿债风险较高的城投债券提供了增信支持,进而推高了城投债券整体的风险溢价和融资成本,这可能会导致地方政府隐性债务风险的积聚。但本文也发现,总量扩张带来的风险可以通过结构调整来改善,专项债券占比的提高释放了投资回报的积极信号,挤入了主体信用评级较高的城投债券,起到了撬动优质投资的作用,在一定程度上缓释了地方债务风险。因此,本文建议充分挖掘高质量的专项债券项目,助力实现稳增长与防风险的长期均衡。

The principle of mitigating and regulating local government debt risk is to“open the front door”while“blocking the back door,”which entails issuing local government bonds to curb the increase in local governments implicit debt represented by municipal corporate bonds.The Budget Law amendment introduced in 2015 grants local governments the power to issue bonds.Since then,local government bonds have expanded rapidly,with the balance reaching 34.9 trillion yuan by 2022,including 14.3 trillion yuan of general bonds and 20.6 trillion yuan of special bonds.More than eight years have gone,but little work has been done to assess the effectiveness of the policy of“opening the front door”while“blocking the back door”.As a result,it is worthwhile to investigate the effect of local government bond expansion and structural adjustment on the issuance and pricing of municipal corporate bonds in China.To address the aforementioned concerns,we manually collected data on 313 prefecture-level cities'debt balances and limits from 2015 to 2020 and matched them with the characteristic dataset of municipal bonds at the prefecture-city level.Due to limited data availability,previous studies on local government bonds generally focused on the provincial level.In practice,provincial governments delegate more than 80%of the bond quota to prefecture-level cities.Therefore we manually collected the debt balance and limit data from city governments'official websites to better portray the distribution of local government explicit debt and provide a better data basis for the upcoming research.The empirical findings show that the expansion of local government bonds has crowded in low-quality municipal corporate bonds,raising their risk premium and financing cost.With the solvency of local government financing vehicles deteriorating,the rising financing cost of municipal corporate bonds may hasten the accumulation of local government debt risks.On the other hand,from a structural standpoint,the increasing proportion of special bonds significantly crowded in high-quality municipal corporate bonds,leveraging high-quality investment and,to some extent,mitigating local government debt risks.This paper's marginal contribution is as follows.First,this study evaluates the effectiveness of local government bond issuance in preventing the expansion of municipal corporate bonds.According to the empirical findings,the increase in local government bonds has not reduced the financing demand for municipal bonds,serving as a cautionary note for local government debt management.Second,this study considers the influence of the Budget Law amendment's relaxation of restrictions on local government financing,providing a new perspective for analyzing municipal corporate bond expansion after 2015 in China.Finally,this study demonstrates that special bonds issued by local governments serve a role in leveraging high-quality investment and,to some extent,mitigating local debt risks.Therefore,in terms of policy implications,it is advised to extensively explore high-quality special bond issuances to achieve a long-term balance of stable growth and risk prevention.We believe that the deteriorating profitability and solvency risk of local government financing vehicles is the critical reason for the emergence of local government bonds guaranteeing and credit enhancement for low-quality municipal corporate bonds.These local government financing vehicles are unable to finance in a market-oriented manner.In future research,we propose to look for a market-based strategy to improve their operating capability or eliminate low-quality local government financing vehicles,thereby to lower the risk of local government debt and enhance its sustainability.