Summary:
This paper examines the income distribution effect of enterprise financing. As enterprises are the main agents of investment and financing, whether the reform of the financing system can regulate income distribution remains questionable. Essentially, the majority of members in society are employees, and their main source of income is salary provided by companies. The internal salary distribution within the company has a significant impact on the overall income distribution pattern of the society. Income inequality has become a major problem restricting China's economic development and social stability. Therefore, studying the impact of enterprise financing on income distribution has important theoretical and practical significance. From the perspective of IPO pricing of new shares, we study the causal relationship between financing constraints and internal income inequality of companies. We use the expected investment project information disclosed by enterprises during the issuance and listing process to accurately measure the degree of financing constraints faced by the enterprises based on the actual gap between the actual raised funds and the planned investment. We take the advantage of the exogenous fluctuations in financing constraints created by the changes in new share issuance pricing (moving from control to relaxation, then back to control and relaxation again), and test the causal relationship between the exogenous alleviation of financing constraints and internal income inequality of companies based on the instrumental variable method. The results show that compared with companies listed during the pricing control stage, the exogenous alleviation of financing constraints in the market-oriented pricing of new shares has intensified the internal income inequality of companies. The mechanism test reveals that the alleviation in financing constraint brought about by the changes in new share issuance pricing not only directly increases the company's cash flow, but also promotes capital investment of the enterprise, significantly improves the operating performance of the enterprise, and thus increases the rent shared by employees and the company. However, the management can obtain more rent sharing, thereby exacerbating the internal income inequality of the company. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the expansion of the influence of financing constraints on internal income inequality is mediated by the management's power and the motivation for executive compensation manipulation, while the power of employees and external environmental constraints can effectively inhibit the impact of financing constraints on internal income inequality. Compared with existing studies, the marginal contributions of this paper may lie in the following aspects: First, this paper strictly confirms the causal relationship between the alleviation of financing constraints caused by excessive IPO financing and the internal income inequality of enterprises. Based on the instrumental variable method, this paper effectively identified the relationship between the financing constraints (alleviation) brought about by excessive IPO financing and the internal income inequality of enterprises due to the different pricing regulations for new share issuance. This will further enrich the research on the influencing factors of income distribution inequality. Second, the main problem faced by this paper is how to accurately measure the actual intensity of financing constraints faced by micro enterprises. This paper proposes a new method for measuring financing constraints, which is to directly measure the relative degree of financing constraints (alleviation) by the level of excessive IPO financing of enterprises. On the one hand, this method conforms to economic intuition and can intuitively reflect the essence of financing constraints; on the other hand, this method has strong applicability and can also be applied to other financing scenarios where enterprises disclose their investment plans. Third, this paper helps us to examine the economic consequences brought about by market-based pricing of new shares from the perspective of income distribution. The IPO issuance system has been gradually reformed towards marketization. The market-oriented reform of new share issuance has indeed improved the pricing efficiency and is conducive to the support of the capital market to the development of the real economy. However, the funds raised by IPO issuance are used for the future production and operation of enterprises, but now they are unequally and separately directed to the company's management and other employees in the form of monetary compensation, which exacerbates the internal income inequality of enterprises. Allocating and using the funds raised by IPO issuance strictly based on the expected use of funds in the prospectus not only requires the enterprises themselves to fulfill their responsibilities, but also requires the regulatory authorities to strengthen the supervision of the use of funds.
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