Financial Leasing, Bank Credit and Enterprise Investment
ZHAO Na, WANG Bo, ZHANG Keyu
School of Economics, Nankai University; School of Finance, Nankai University; Hanqing Advanced Institute of Economics and Finance, Renmin University of China
Summary:
Financial leasing has been developing rapidly and become one of the closest financial forces connected with the real economy in the context of new economic normal. It provides a possibility for private capital to flow into formal financing channels. It also provides financing opportunities for private enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, and makes up for the lack of state-owned banks' financing functions. As financial leasing and bank credit are equally important financing channels, their relationship and whether financial leasing can serve as an effective alternative to traditional financing channels to promote corporate investment are worthy of in-depth consideration. These issues are also very important for improving financing channels' ability to accurately serve the real economy, establishing a multi-level market system, ensuring stability on the six fronts and securiry in the six areas. Domestic and foreign literature on the relationship between financial leasing and bank credit is mainly based on two theories: the debt replacement theory (Myers et al., 1976) and the complementary theory (Lewis and Schallheim, 1992). However, more than 90% transactions in China's current leasing market are financial leasing, of which sale-and-leaseback transactions account for a large proportion, reaching as high as 83.9% in 2015. Operating leasing transactions account for only 12.5%. Therefore, it is difficult to apply the complementary theoretical mechanism in China based on the current development of leasing industry and the characteristics of taxation arrangements. In this paper, we manually collect the financial leasing data from the annual reports of all A-share listed companies in China's Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during 2004 to 2016 for empirical testing. The results show that both financial leasing and bank credit can significantly increase company's investment rate, and financial leasing has a significant substitution effect on bank credit. Since financing constraints play a very important role, we select corporate asset tangibility, asset-liability ratio and corporate ownership as indicators to explore the role they play in the substitution relationship. We find that tighter financing constraints are associated with greater substitution effect of financial leasing on bank credit. Our study contributes to the literature in the following three aspects. First, most domestic research on financial leasing focuses on macro-level analyses, while there are relatively few micro-level studies (Shi and Xu, 2013). We empirically examine the substitution effect of financial leasing on bank credit from the enterprise level and provide micro evidence for the impact of financial leasing on economic growth, which enriches and expands the research scope of financial leasing. Second, existing research mostly discusses the quantitative change relationship between financial leasing and bank credit (Deloof and Verschueren, 1999; Lin et al, 2013), but this quantitative change may be affected by common factors such as corporate asset structure, etc., which may lead to endogenous problems and estimation biases. Moreover, the quantitative analyses cannot reflect the existence of the substitution effect. Therefore, according to the nature of substitutes in microeconomics, and based on the common characteristics of financial leasing and bank credit--their “financing” attribute as financing channels, we start from the perspective of corporate investment to test whether the substitution relationship between the two exists. Third, we analyze the impact of financing constraints on the substitution effect. The results show that for companies facing stronger financing constraints, financial leasing has a more obvious substitution effect on bank credit, which suggests that financial leasing has a comparative advantage in alleviating corporate financing constraints. Our findings have the following policy implications. With the advantage of “integration of industry and finance”, the government should actively promote the effective use of the dual attributes of financial leasing, improve its ability to accurately serve the real economy, and provide strong financial support for the construction of a new development pattern. At the same time, in regard to the “credit-like” function of financial leasing, especially the function of sale-and-leaseback transactions, the government should actively improve the relevant policies, standardize and guide them to return to their original source, and promote the transformation of the risk prevention of leasing business from the credit of the lessee to the credit of the leased property to better prevent and resolve systemic financial risks.
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