Summary:
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.
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