Summary:
“Financing difficulties and high financing costs” are not only important factors hindering the development of private economy in China, but are also realistic, inevitable problems in the current stage of the transformation of the Chinese economy. In recent years, Chinese government departments have been committed to fostering the construction of a market system to solve private enterprises' financing problems. Much effort has been made to establish a multi-level capital market, develop fintech, and standardize and simplify investment and financing procedures to expand financing channels for private enterprises and help them overcome their financial constraints to transformation and upgrading. However, the design of a formal system requires several preliminary demonstrations and its specific implementation depends on many factors, such as a good business environment and markets, and relevant practitioners' professionalism. Achieving systematic improvement in these factors quickly is usually difficult because it generally takes a long time for the relevant systems to be formulated and then implemented.We explore whether there are any supplementary mechanisms other than the formal financial system that could be used to quickly respond to and effectively ease private enterprises' financing constraints. Accordingly, we use a sample of private listed enterprises between 2008 and 2017 to explore whether private companies' membership of regional chambers of commerce approved by the Chinese government can help ease their financing constraints. The results suggest that membership of a regional chamber of commerce significantly alleviates enterprises' corporate financing constraints. The results remain robust after using instrumental variables and propensity score matching. A mechanism test shows that joining the regional merchant guild helps to expand member enterprises' relationship network and improve their market bargaining power. Specifically, regional merchant guilds can help members to obtain bank loans and improve their trade credit level in economic transactions. Furthermore, the effect of joining regional chambers of commerce on alleviating financing constraints is more obvious for small member enterprises with weaker market bargaining power and those facing financial difficulties. In addition, when a shock occurs to the local credit environment, the regional chamber of commerce can partly offset the negative impact of the shock on corporate financing constraints. Finally, chambers of commerce have a stronger positive effect on their members' financing constraints in regions with lower marketization, which indicates that chambers of commerce can serve as a supplementary mechanism to the free market system. We contribute to the literature in several ways. First, we provide evidence from a corporate finance perspective to boost the relevant research literature on Chinese regional chambers of commerce. In China, it is very common for entrepreneurs to jointly establish regional chambers of commerce, but empirical studies on regional chambers of commerce and corporate finance are relatively rare. We use a large sample of Chinese private enterprises in an empirical analysis that confirms that regional chambers of commerce help private enterprises to obtain financial support. This finding supplements the literature and also provides a new perspective for the empirical development of corporate finance. Second, our enterprise-level analysis enriches the literature related to the economic impact of traditional Chinese culture on modern business practices. Regional chambers of commerce are a contemporary practice in the traditional merchant guild culture. Du et al. (2015) and Kanagaretnam et al. (2019) show that the historical merchant guild culture can help reduce the agency cost of modern enterprises and improve their corporate social responsibility. We use the unique perspective of regional chambers of commerce in the modern commercial market to supplement the empirical evidence to generate more comprehensive insights into how cultural traditions affect the development of modern enterprises. Third, we expand the literature related to Chinese private enterprises' financing constraints and provide new policy ideas for solving private enterprises' financing problems during the transition stages of China's economy. As a type of social organization approved by government departments, we find that regional chambers of commerce are very helpful in alleviating private enterprises' financing problems. This result not only enriches the relevant literature on alleviating private enterprises' financing constraints, but also provides a new perspective outside of the financial system to help government departments develop policies that address private enterprises' problems of “financing difficulties and high financing costs.”
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