Summary:
The Chinese economy is in the stage of high-quality transformation and development, characterized by industrial upgrading and structural optimization. Therefore, how to stimulate market entities' vitality, especially how finance can boost corporate vitality, is an urgent task for current economic development. In the Chinese financial system, which is dominated by indirect financing, real enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, often choose bank loans as the relatively safe path when conducting external financing. The market-oriented competition transformation in the banking industry is bound to influence corporate investment and strategic vitality. The existing studies show that the development of small and medium-sized banks (subsequently referred to as SMBs) can break the monopoly of large banks on the banking market and promote healthy competition in the banking industry, then alleviate the enterprises' financing constraints through the Market Power effect and Distance-Information effect, and optimize the financial resource allocation. Based on the thesis that bank competition affects corporate strategic aggressiveness, we first construct a tripartite dynamic evolutionary game model including enterprises, large banks, and SMBs for theoretical analysis and numerical simulation experiments. Then we conduct empirical research based on the data of Chinese listed companies from 2004 to 2021. We find that an increase in the market share of SMBs enhances bank competition, which can improve the capital allocation efficiency and relieve enterprises' financing constraints, and in turn has a positive effect on corporate strategy aggressiveness. Moreover, through heterogeneity analysis, we find that the positive effect of bank competition on corporate strategic choice is more significant in enterprises with higher information asymmetry and without a specific bank-enterprise relationship, which demonstrates the Distance-Information effect and Market Power effect. Extended analysis further demonstrates that bank competition induces enterprises to adopt more aggressive strategies, which in turn improves innovation output and total factor productivity significantly. This paper contributes to the literature in two main aspects. First, previous studies primarily focused on the impact of bank competition on single-dimensional enterprise activities, which may ignore the multi-dimensional and long-term nature of business strategies, as well as the overall strategic adjustment of enterprises. Our research starts from a more comprehensive strategy perspective. We not only consider the impact of bank competition on enterprises' R&D, but also analyze its effect on enterprises' other strategic behavior, such as market expansion and organizational structure change. Based on this foundation, our study further demonstrates, through the perspective of corporate strategy, how benign bank competition stimulates enterprises to pursue more aggressive strategies, thereby elevating both innovation output and productive efficiency. The results reveal that the optimization of banking market structure plays a more extensive and far-reaching role in promoting the high-quality development of the real economy. Second, previous studies on bank competition and enterprise business primarily focused on empirical research, and the theoretical model analysis are especially insufficient. Although some relevant studies have conducted theoretical model analysis based on the equilibrium theory, such models ignore the differences in behavioral responses of different entities and their interactions under non-equilibrium conditions, and lack corresponding model simulation evidence. We innovatively construct a tripartite dynamic evolutionary game model. Through rigorous theoretical derivation and simulation experiment, this paper intuitively shows the evolution path of different entities from a non-equilibrium state to an equilibrium state. This can provide a more solid micro foundation for studying the impact of bank competition on corporate strategies. This study offers policy insight that, to achieve the goals of efficiently allocating financial resources and stimulating the strategic vitality of market entities, a critical part is to unleash the positive competitive effects of SMBs. Specifically, they should foster a new pattern featuring effective competition and differentiated complementarity. For joint-stock banks, they should strengthen nationwide competitiveness, leveraging their integrated and diversified strengths. Regional banks, such as city commercial banks and rural commercial banks, should concentrate their competitive efforts on local real economy through their innate local advantages, and try to evolve into pivotal hubs in their local credit markets. By stimulating the development vitality and competitive advantages of SMBs, the efficient financial system can provide accurate and efficient financial support for the construction of a modern industrial system and the development of new quality productive forces.
彭方平, 廖敬贤, 李晋阳. 银行业竞争与企业战略选择:理论与证据[J]. 金融研究, 2025, 544(10): 58-76.
PENG Fangping, LIAO Jingxian, LI Jinyang. Bank Competition and Corporate Strategic Choice: Theory and Evidence. Journal of Financial Research, 2025, 544(10): 58-76.
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