金融强监管、存贷长期化与企业短债长用

Strict Financial Regulation,Longer-term Deposits and Loans,and Funding Long-term Projects with Short-term Debts

债务与资产的期限结构错配(短债长用)是中国企业普遍存在的债务问题。已有研究认为其成因在于供给侧,银行为控制自身风险和应对信贷考核压力,更多地对企业提供短期信贷。近年来,金融强监管(资管新规)重塑银行资产负债管理,一个值得研究的问题是,这对于企业短债长用的债务问题产生何种影响。本文研究发现:(1)资管新规压降银行保本理财的同时,推动定期存款扩张,导致存款期限拉长的结构变化;(2)基于生命周期与风险偏好理论并经实证验证,前述存款长期化依人口结构(老龄人口越多)呈现空间结构异质性(效应越强);(3)构建三阶段计量模型识别“住户存款长期化→企业贷款长期化→企业短债长用减少”的因果链条。本文研究表明,资管新规类金融强监管政策对于企业短债长用的债务问题发挥了治理作用,并存在时空双维的结构效应,为完善现代金融监管、深化金融供给侧结构性改革提供经验参考。

Long-term loans play a significant role in business development.Many researchers worldwide have proved that long-term financing has a positive impact on a firm's profitability,sustainability,and productivity by effectively supporting its long-term investment and development(Schiantarelli & Srivastava,1997;Beck et al.,2005;Lu et al.,2006;Chen et al.,2009).However,a widespread phenomenon in China is that firms can only partially resort to the continuous renewal of short-term loans to support long-term projects(Zhong et al.,2016),which is the asset-debt maturity mismatch.In April 2018,the People's Bank of China,the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission,the China Securities Regulatory Commission,and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange issued the Guiding Opinions on Regulating the Asset Management Business of Financial Institutions(hereinafter referred to as the New Asset Management Regulation),which bans financial institutions from carrying out asset management business on the balance sheet and promising guaranteed principal and returns of asset management products.Therefore,this strict financial regulation may decrease the scale of principal-guaranteed wealth management products and increase the scale and lengthen the maturity of household deposits.So,what types of investors are more likely to deposit after the policy shock? Will the lengthened term of deposits help to alleviate the asset-debt maturity mismatch disturbing Chinese firms? To address these questions,this paper uses the spatial dimension of regional aging and the time dimension before and after the New Asset Management Regulation to construct a difference-in-differences model and empirically finds the structure heterogeneity of strict financial regulation on both time and space dimensions.Specifically,on the time dimension,while the New Asset Management Regulation requires banks to decrease the scale of principal-guaranteed wealth management products,it encourages banks to increase the scale and lengthen the maturity of household deposits,leading to structural changes in deposit terms.Moreover,the deposit maturity lengthening presents spatial heterogeneity according to population distribution,which means that the higher the proportion of the elderly population in a region,the stronger the effect.Finally,this paper identifies the transmission chain of “longer-term household deposit→longer-term corporate loan→alleviation of asset-debt maturity mismatch” through a three-stage econometric model and proves that strict financial regulations play an effective governance role in alleviating the distortions that firms use short-term debts to support their long-term investments.This paper has three main contributions.First,it highlights a previously unexplored link between strict financial regulation such as the New Asset Management Regulation,and the term structure transformation in the financial system.It not only supplements the policy evaluation studies on strict financial regulation(Li et al.,2022;Jiang et al.,2020) but also emphasizes the unintended consequences of strict financial regulation.Second,this paper focuses on the role of the term structure transformation in Chinese firms' debt management.Longer and stable capital supply from banks helps firms mitigate the influence of asset-debt maturity mismatch in the real economy.Our results,consistent with the conclusions of the important research on asset-debt maturity mismatch(Liu & Liu,2019),suggest that the solutions to the problem of firms funding long-term projects with short-term debts lie in the capital supply side which improves their ability to provide long-term capital.Third,this paper identifies the spatial heterogeneity of policy effects and explores the economic and financial impacts of aging.This paper employs the aging degree as a spatial cross-section to reveal that a unified national regulation may have different effects in regions,and the aging degree is only one aspect of the many regional differences in China.Analyzing other heterogeneities of regional effects of unified macro policies is potentially a fertile area for future research(Beraja et al.,2019).Lastly,with the acceleration of aging in China,it is of strong practical significance to highlight the economic and financial consequences of population aging.The results of this paper may help to understand how population aging affects the financial market and provide a useful reference for policy introduction and optimization in the aging era.