School of International Trade and Economics, University of International Business and EconomicsSchool of Economics and Management, North China University of TechnologySchool of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University
Summary:
Since the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (NCCPC), China's economic development goal has changed from ‘high speed' to ‘high quality’.The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th NCCPC further pointed out that it is necessary to ‘accelerate the construction of a modern economic system with the theme of promoting high-quality development’.In the context of the economic transition from ‘high speed' to ‘high quality’, overcapacity has always been a problem that plagued the process of economic transformation.In order to control overcapacity, China have repeatedly issued de-capacity policies in the past ten years with policy tools covering financial, fiscal taxation and market access areas.The goal of the financial policy is to adjust the allocation of resources among industries from the funding source, limiting the funding channels of overcapacity enterprise and achieving the purpose of reducing overcapacity.After the de-capacity policy was promulgated, relevant financial institutions restricted loans and capital market financing to assist in reducing overcapacity.However, while bank loans and other financing methods for overcapacity enterprises have declined, the funds obtained through financial leasing have continued to increase.Is there some kind of regulatory arbitrage behind this phenomenon？ What consequences will such a regulatory arbitrage have on the implementation of the de-capacity policy？ This paper attempts to provide a possible theoretical explanation for the interaction mechanism between the de-capacity policy and financial leasing, and to confirm the theoretical explanation through empirical research.Specifically, this paper manually collects information on financial leasing transactions of Chinese listed companies, and uses the Difference in Differences (DID) method to identify the relationship between the de-capacity policy and financial leasing. Our empirical results show that the de-capacity policy has significantly promoted the expansion of the scale of financial leasing, which in turn weakens the effect of the de-capacity policy to a certain extent.Further analysis shows that the de-capacity policy has promoted the expansion of the scale of financial leasing from both the demand side and the supply side.On the demand side, the de-capacity policy restricts overcapacity enterprises from obtaining long-term funds, thus expanding the long-term funding gap and prompting them to actively seek alternative funding channels such as financial leasing.On the supply side, the main channel for overcapacity enterprises to obtain financial leasing is bank-affiliated leasing companies, implying that there are bank funds evading supervision through financial leasing and flowing to overcapacity enterprises. The innovations of this paper include two aspects.First, this paper provides new evidence for the causal relationship between financing constraints and financial leasing.Existing literature has pointed out that alleviating financing constraints is an important motivation of financial leasing.Enterprises with stronger financing constraints will use more financial leasing.However, these studies often suffer from endogenous problems in the identification of the relationship between financing constraints and financial leasing.The de-capacity policy makes overcapacity enterprises face stronger financing constraints than non-overcapacity enterprises.At the same time, the policy is not under the control of enterprises, which can be seen as an exogenous impact that affects financing constraints and avoid endogenous problems.Therefore, this paper can provide robust causal evidence about financing constraints and financial leasing.Second, this paper can provide ideas for China to formulate more scientific and effective industrial policies, thereby promoting ‘high-quality' development.With the expansion of shadow banks such as financial leasing, the formulation of industrial policies should not only consider mainstream financing channels such as bank loans, but also consider shadow banking channels.Under the goal of high-quality development, China should fully consider the interaction between industrial policies and the financial system to achieve a benign interaction between industrial policies and the financial system.
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