Summary:
Industrial policies are government policies that promote a certain industry in a country or region and represent government intervention in the economy. Although such policies are widely used, there is no consensus on their economic consequences. On the one hand, industrial policies help to overcome market failure; on the other, the government lacks sufficient information to pick winners, and industrial policies may lead to rent-seeking behavior. The question of how to evaluate the effects of industrial policies on the efficiency of economic resource allocation has attracted widespread theoretical and practical attention. China's financial system is dominated by indirect finance, and efficient credit allocation is the key to its overall operating efficiency. In practice, there is a close relationship between bank loans and industrial policy: credit policy itself is a part of industrial policy in some circumstances, and other industrial policies often work by encouraging or restricting bank loans. The efficiency of loan contracting reflects the efficiency of credit allocation. For this reason, loan contracting provides a proper perspective for understanding the relationship between industrial policy and the efficiency of economic resource allocation. We analyze the effect of industrial policy on credit allocation efficiency from the perspective of loan contracting. Loan contract data is manually collected from the notes to the annual reports of listed firms from 2008 to 2015; the data set consists of 13,096 loan contracts from 1,069 listed firms. An industry is defined as supported by industry policy if it belongs to the industries supported by the national Five Year Plan. The major findings are as follows. (1) For listed firms that are in industries supported by national industrial policy, the favorable effect of firm's relationship with the government on loan contracting is greater, and the favorable effect of TFP on loan contracting is smaller. (2) The effect of industrial policy on loan contracting is stronger for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and for firms located in provinces with higher growth rates for fixed asset investments and weaker legal environments. Our research contributes to the literature in the following three ways. First, it is the first to investigate the effect of industrial policy on the efficiency of economic resource allocation from the perspective of loan contracting in China. Previous studies have analyzed how industrial policy affects firms' investment and financing behavior, output, innovation, employment, etc. This paper examines how industrial policy affects the relation between firm's relationship with the government and loan contracting. This study also directly examines the effect of industrial policy on credit allocation efficiency, which provides a new perspective for understanding the mechanism through which industrial policy functions. Second, this study provides direct evidence that industrial policy may lead to rent-seeking behavior. Rodrik (2004, 2008) argues that industrial policy often fails due to rent-seeking behavior. Specifically, industrial policy causes economic resources to flow to firms related with the government. We find that industrial policy increases the favorable effect of firms' relationship with the government on loan contracting, which provides direct support for the notion that rent-seeking behavior may result from industrial policy. Third, this paper analyzes credit allocation efficiency from the perspective of loan contracting, which enriches the literature on credit allocation efficiency in China. Our findings have a number of policy implications. First, the government should take a more prudent attitude toward industrial policy. For industrial policies that are considered necessary, the government should ensure more effective decision-making from the beginning. Second, the government should more closely supervise the implementation of industrial policy to prevent market players from using it for rent-seeking and to reduce the distortion of resource allocation. Third, financial institutions should engage in greater credit management in relation to industrial policy, prevent the abuse of funds, and improve credit allocation efficiency. Fourth, industrial policy should focus on creating a good market environment that supports favored industries.
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