资本市场开放与企业“脱实向虚”行为——来自“沪港通”开通的证据

Capital Market Liberalization and Corporate Financialization:Evidence from a Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect

全方位、多层次开放中国资本市场与切实深化金融体系改革是党的十九大以来的重要部署和战略举措。本文聚焦于近年来受到广泛关注的上市公司金融化现象,基于“沪港通”交易制度的施行,采用双重差分模型与倾向得分匹配法,实证检验资本市场开放对企业“脱实向虚”行为的影响及其内在机制。研究结果表明,资本市场开放可以抑制企业“脱实向虚”行为,该结论经过一系列的稳健性检验依旧成立。进一步的机制检验表明,资本市场开放通过缓解标的企业的融资约束,引导企业资源更多流向实体业务,从而减少企业金融化行为。进一步研究表明,资本市场开放对企业金融化的抑制作用在非国有企业、信息环境差以及境外投资者监督力度强时更为明显。本文为资本市场开放的经济后果提供了直接的微观证据,对进一步提高资本市场开放水平、深化金融体系结构性调整,从而推动资本市场高质量发展具有借鉴意义。

Since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,deepening the financial system reform and broadly opening capital market have been China's major strategies and plans.In this paper,we use the difference-in-difference regression(DID)and propensity score matching method(PSM)to empirically test the impact of capital market liberalization on listed firms'financialization and further explore the underlying mechanism.Our findings show that capital market liberalization significantly constrains corporate financialization.The results remain unchanged after a battery of robustness tests.Further,we find that capital market liberalization can reduce firms'financialization activities by alleviating their financial constraints,which leads to more capital resources input to real economy.The crosssectional tests show that,the negative relationship between capital market liberalization and corporate financialization is more pronounced for Non-SOEs firms,firms with lower information transparency,and firms with more active foreign investors.Our study provides firmlevel evidence for the economic consequences of capital market liberalization,and has policy implications for further improving the level of capital market opening,deepening the structural reform of the financial system,and promoting the high-quality development of the capital market.