营商环境与企业“脱实向虚”

Business Environment and Enterprises Being Diverted out of the Real Economy

基于A股上市公司数据,探讨在“以国内大循环为主体,推动国内国际双循环相互促进”背景下的营商环境改善对企业“脱虚向实”的影响及其内在作用机制。研究发现,地区营商环境越好,企业的金融资产投资水平越低;基于“行政审批中心设立”的准自然实验,进一步证实营商环境的改善显著降低了企业的金融资产持有水平。机制检验发现,这一效应的产生是通过降低企业经营风险和提高实体投资效益两条路径实现的。拓展性研究发现,营商环境改善在降低企业金融资产投资的同时,提高了企业对研发的投资;这些效应在中小企业和非国有企业中尤为显著。上述结果表明营商环境的改善有助于激励企业“脱虚向实”,这在政策层面意味着改善营商环境可能是解决经济“脱实向虚”和民营企业、中小企业纾困发展两大问题的一剂良药。

Nowadays,it is a consensus from both industries and academia that an effective mechanism has to be found to control the aggravating situation that enterprises are“being diverted out of the real economy”.Since“being diverted out of the real economy”is the result of enterprises investment choices,it is necessary to find a possible solution from the aspect of influence factors of enterprises investment to motivate or guide them to reduce investment in financial assets so as to reverse the process.As the collection of all external factors,the business environment can affect enterprises investment behavior.Specifically,on the one hand,the sound business environment reduces business risk and alleviates financial constraints;on the other hand,it increases the profit from productive investment and narrows down investment profit rate’s gap between financial asset investment and fixed asset investment,both of which are helpful in motivating enterprises to reduce financial asset investment.Therefore,improving the business environment may be an important channel to solve the problem of enterprises“being diverted out of the real economy”.In the benchmark regression,the two-way fixed effects model is used to explore the impact of the business environment on the enterprises’financial asset investments.In terms of the selection of variables,the“China City Comprehensive Economic Competitiveness Index”in the“Annual Report on China’s Urban Competitiveness”released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is used to measure the city’s business environment.Based on existing studies on the investment of enterprise financial assets,this paper defines the investment of enterprise financial assets in broad and narrow sense respectively.In the robust test,to address possible endogeneity problems,we take the establishment of administrative approval center as a quasi-natural experiment,and use the heterogeneous timing DID model to explore the impact of the business environment on the enterprises’financial asset investment.Additionally,we introduce historical data from capital cities as port of entry as the instrumental variable for the business environment and employ two-stage least squares specification to further address potential endogeneity problems.The main findings of this paper are as follows.(1)The business environment can significantly reduce enterprise financial asset investment.In small and medium-sized enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises,the improvement of the business environment has a more significant role in reducing enterprise financial asset investment.(2)On the one hand,the improvement of the business environment has created a transparent,stable,and predictable external environment for enterprises.By decreasing the business risk and alleviating financial constraints of enterprises,financial assets,which are held by enterprises due to the enterprises’concern of“the reservoir effect”,can be reduced.On the other hand,the improvement of the business environment has reduced the institutional transaction costs of enterprises.By increasing the rates of return in the fixed asset investment,the profit rates gap is narrowed so as to reduce financial assets held by enterprises due to their concern of“the substitution effect”.(3)The improvement of the business environment not only reduces enterprises financial asset investment but also increases enterprises productive investment,and promotes the R&D investment of enterprises.A sound business environment can promote listed enterprises to achieve their“return to the real economy”transformation by reducing risks and increasing productive investment returns,but there could be further improvement in the business environment in China.Therefore,the government should create a transparent,stable,and predictable business environment so as to reduce business risks.Meanwhile,the government should further simplify the approval process of business registration and administrative licensing so as to decrease institutional transaction costs of enterprises,thus maximizing the incentive effect of the business environment for enterprise’s“return to the real economy”.