中小银行网点扩张与企业信贷期限结构

Branch Expansion of Small and Medium-Sized Banks and the Credit Term Structure of Enterprises

构建与实体经济结构和融资需求相适应的银行业结构,有助于增强金融服务实体经济的功能。本文考察了放松中小银行分支机构市场准入引发的股份制和城市商业银行网点扩张对企业信贷期限结构的影响。研究发现,中小银行网点扩张能够有效延长企业的信贷期限结构,且对中小企业和民营企业的作用更强。机制检验表明,中小银行网点扩张加剧了企业周围的银行竞争环境,并通过缩短银企距离降低了企业信息不对称和代理冲突,进而增强了银行为企业提供长期贷款的意愿。本文还发现,数字金融发展能够增强商业银行为实体企业提供长期信贷资金的能力,尤其是为中小企业和民营企业。此外,中小银行网点扩张有助于缓解企业“短贷长投”,且对中小企业和民营企业的缓解作用更强。本文从企业信贷期限结构视角深化了对放松中小银行市场准入微观经济效应及其异质性功能表现的理解和认识,为最优金融结构理论提供了微观经验证据,也为深化金融体制改革及有效提升金融服务实体经济的能力提供了有益启示。

The Chinese economy is transitioning from a phase of rapid growth to one of high-quality development,with a greater emphasis on innovation-driven and quality-led growth.This requires long-term and stable financial support.However,for a long time,China's banking-dominated financial system has primarily supplied short-term loans,resulting in a significant shortage of long-term credit funds.This inadequacy fails to meet the long-term investment and high-quality development needs of entity enterprises.Existing research indicates that the highly concentrated structure of China's banking industry is a major factor leading to the mismatch between the supply and demand of long-term credit funds.In the institutional environment of financial repression,banks face low competitive pressure.Due to risk control considerations,banks prefer to provide short-term loans to enterprises and are reluctant to provide long-term loans.Meanwhile,large state-owned banks tend to allocate long-term loans to less efficient state-owned enterprises,while small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs)and private enterprises of higher efficiency struggle to obtain long-term loan support.According to the optimal financial structure theory,a country's banking structure can more effectively support the real economy only when it aligns with its industrial structure.Currently,China's industrial structure is dominated by SMEs,but the development of small and medium-sized banks(SMBs)has lagged.In 2009,the China Banking Regulatory Commission issued the“Opinions on Adjusting Market Entry Policies for Branches of Small and Medium-sized Commercial Banks(Trial).”This policy removed the restrictions on market entry and the limitations on the number of branches that joint-stock and city commercial banks could establish,leading to a rapid expansion in the number of their branches.Based on this,this paper examines the impact of the expansion of joint-stock and city commercial bank branches on the term structure of corporate loans.We find that SMB branch expansion can extend the term structure of corporate loans.Compared to large enterprises,it has a stronger effect on SMEs,supporting the hypothesis of“Comparative Advantages of SMBs”.Meanwhile,the effect is more pronounced for private enterprises.Mechanism tests show that SMB branch expansion intensifies banking competition and reduces information asymmetry and agency conflicts by shortening the distance between banks and enterprises,thereby increasing banks'willingness to provide long-term loans to enterprises.We also find that the development of digital finance enhances commercial banks'ability to provide long-term loans to real enterprises,especially to SMEs and private enterprises.Finally,SMB branch expansion helps alleviate the“short-term loans for long-term investments”of enterprises,especially SMEs and private enterprises.The main contributions of this paper are as follows.First,while most existing studies examine the impact of bank competition on corporate investment and financing based on data from all bank branches,this paper focuses on the expansion of joint-stock and city commercial bank branches.By constructing firm-level spatial distribution data of SMB branches,it captures the specific banking environment changes each firm faces,providing a more direct and precise identification of the microeconomic effects of SMB branching deregulation.Second,through a comparative analysis of the differential impact of SMB branch expansion on the loan terms for large enterprises versus SMEs,we find that SMBs have a greater advantage in serving SMEs.This not only deepens the understanding of the heterogeneous functions of SMBs but also provides micro-level empirical support for the optimal financial structure theory.Third,Zhang et al.(2022)found that digital finance development inhibits the expansion of joint-stock and city commercial banks.We further find that digital finance development enhances banks'capabilities in information acquisition and screening,thus improving their ability to provide long-term credit to entity enterprises,complementing existing research.