Bank Competition, Financial Constraints, and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from Industrial Firms in China
ZHANG Xuan, LI Zijian, LI Chuntao
School of Statistics and Mathematics, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law; School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics; School of Finance, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law
Summary:
Innovation is the driving force for economic growth and provides sustained support for economic growth and development, especially in China’s manufacturing industry. Although the literature has have documented the effects of bank competition on firm innovation, we are still curious about the channels through which bank competition is affecting firm innovation.This paper contributes to the literature by examining the impact of bank competition on enterprise innovation from a financing constraint perspective. In addition, we use China’s entry into the WTO as a policy shock, which allows us to use a difference-in-differences method to deal with the endogeneity issues. Unlike previous studies, which uses either short term data or single innovation measures, this paper allows us to examine the effects of heterogeneous business environments on firm innovation. The data used in this paper are from the China Industrial Enterprise Database from 1998 to 2007, the Enterprise Patent Database of the State Intellectual Property Office, and the information on commercial bank branches disclosed by the China Banking Regulatory Commission. We construct a mediation effect model to test the impact of bank competition on firm innovation through mitigating the firms’ financial constraints. The results are as follows. First, bank competition is found to significantly promote firm innovation. Second, bank competition can reduce firms’ financing constraints. Finally, after controlling for financial constraints, the impact of bank competition on corporate innovation remains positive, although it is slightly weaker. These results indicate that financing constraints have a partial mediating effect on the relationship between bank competition and corporate innovation. In addition, we add the interaction between bank competition and financing constraints to further verify the channel through which bank competition affects firm innovation. The results exhibit a significantly negative coefficient for the interaction term, indicating that the monopoly power of the banking industry strengthens the adverse effect of financing constraints on firm innovation. This shows that bank competition can promote firm innovation by reducing firms’ external financing constraints. We address the endogeneity issues by using a difference-in-differences method and an instrumental variable approach. After China joined the WTO, the government began to gradually eliminate the restrictions on foreign banks establishing branches in China and conducting business in RMB. This policy change created a quasi-natural multi-period experimental setting, which allows us to use a difference-in-differences method to address the endogeneity issues. We further use the average bank competition of three cities with similar GDP within the same province as an instrumental variable for bank competition and use a two-stage regression to disentangle the endogeneity issues. We also conduct a series of robustness tests with different financing constraint measures, different competition variables, more recent industry survey data, and more rigorous estimation methods. Our main findings are robust to the above changes. We then conduct split-sample analyses to test the heterogeneity effect. Our results show that the effect of bank competition on firm innovation is more pronounced for firms that are more dependent on external financing, small and medium-sized firms, private firms, firms from regions with higher levels of marketization, and firms from regions with better legal protection. In addition, we find that the competition between non-SOE banks and city commercial banks can better promote enterprise innovation. The results of this paper show that a moderate competition in the financial sector is crucial for promoting corporate financing and innovation, which in turn can affect a country’s financial stability and economic growth. The development of small and medium-sized banks has broadened the channels for corporate financing and injected new vitality into firm innovation in China. Therefore, further reforms of the financial system should focus on optimizing the structure of the financial system and establishing a multi-layer and diversified financial market to effectively alleviate the financing constraints of SMEs and encourage innovation through the provision of better financial services.
张璇, 李子健, 李春涛. 银行业竞争、融资约束与企业创新——中国工业企业的经验证据[J]. 金融研究, 2019, 472(10): 98-116.
ZHANG Xuan, LI Zijian, LI Chuntao. Bank Competition, Financial Constraints, and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from Industrial Firms in China. Journal of Financial Research, 2019, 472(10): 98-116.
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