Bank Competition, Short Selling and Firms' Financial Constraints
XU Feng, LV Qian, ZHENG Yaodong
Institute of Finance and Banking, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; School of Management, South-central MinZu University; Chinese Public Administration Society
Summary:
The financial constraint is both the major research issue of corporate finance and the focus of government policies. Recent reports on the work of the government have emphasized the importance of alleviating difficulties and high costs faced by firms in accessing financing. The regulatory authorities have implemented a series of measures to alleviate firms' financial constraints. When discussing the firms' financial constraint issue, most existing literature, based on China's bank-dominated financial system, focuses on the aspect of credit supply. Especially, with the rapid reform of the banking industry, there is a new trend to research firms' financial constraints in the aspect of bank competition. However, the interactions between banks and the capital market are ignored in most literature. This paper discusses the interactive effects of short selling on bank competition and corporate financial constraints in the context of the possibility for banks to gather information on firm value from capital markets. Theoretically, information asymmetry exists between banks and firms in an imperfect credit market. The increased competition impels banks to gather and uncover firms' information, which lowers the information asymmetry, and thus alleviates firms' financial constraints. Meanwhile, short selling improves firms' information disclosure and reduces their financial risks. There are distinguished necessities for banks to mine firms' information under different short selling constraints. In other words, short selling is not only a key factor of firms' financial constraints, but also the institutional background that affects the relationship of bank competition and firms' financial constraints. Based on the gradual reform of the short selling system in China's capital market, this paper adopts a sample of listed companies from 2008 to 2020 and implements a time-varying DID method to examine how bank competition and short selling affect the enterprises' financial constraints. Our results show that the short selling mechanism attenuates the impact of bank competition on corporate finance constraints. The short selling is proved to relieve the information asymmetry between banks and firms, and alleviate firms' financial risks, which results in such diminishment. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the interactive effects of short selling on bank competition and corporate financial constraints are pronounced mainly in industries with higher external financial dependency, state-owned firms, large state-owned banks, and city commercial banks. Further analysis shows that the interaction between short selling and bank competition also acts on the amount of firms' debt financing and the risk of debt default, but the effect on the cost of debt financing is insignificant. Compared with relevant literature, the three main contributions of our paper are as follows. First, while the existing studies suppose bank competition and the short selling mechanism have separate impacts on firms' financial constraints, this paper combines bank competition and short selling to explore the problem of corporate financing constraints, linking the relationships between banks and firms through the channels of information asymmetry and financial risks. Second, most of the literature focuses on the scope of bank-firm relations from the perspectives of firm characteristics, industry characteristics, bank structure and the degree of bank competition, and fails to discuss the bank credit issues in the context of the impact of institutional changes in the capital market. This paper, in the context of the reality that competition in the banking industry is comparatively sufficient, examines the relationship between bank competition, the short selling mechanism and corporate financing constraints. We then identify the conditions of industry, enterprise and bank characteristics for the short-selling mechanism to weaken bank competition and alleviate corporate financing constraints, revealing the important theoretical and policy value of capital market institutional construction in alleviating the constraints of corporate indirect financing. Third, the short selling mechanism as an important policy event in the progressive reform of the capital market provides new ideas for many classical problems. This paper extends the policy effect test of the short selling system reform to the field of bank-firm relations from the perspective of comparative institutional.
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