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| The Belt and Road Initiative and Corporate Bond Yield Spreads |
| XU Si, PAN Xintong, LIN Wanfa
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School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University;
Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University;
School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University |
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Abstract During his visits to Central and Southeast Asia in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which are together now referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to strengthen infrastructure connectivity, promote the orderly and free flow of economic factors, a highly efficient allocation of resources, and the deep integration of markets. The Belt and Road Initiative provides strong impetus for economic transformation and upgrading. Hence, academic and practical circles quickly began to explore the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on the behavior of micro-enterprises. In this paper, we investigate whether the Belt and Road Initiative has an impact on the corporate bond market.
Theoretically, the Belt and Road Initiative may imply both benefits and risks for the corporate bond market. For example, the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative reduces the corporate bond yield spreads of supported firms for the following reasons. To make progress on the Belt and Road construction, Chinese governments tend to provide financial subsidies or tax preferences for supported firms, which can directly reduce their default risk. With the in-depth development of the Belt and Road Initiative, the business environment of the supported firms will simultaneously continue to improve and the efficiency of resource allocation is expected to improve further. With the strong support of government policies, bond investors face lower default risk and choose to demand relatively low risk compensation from supported firms. Additionally, the Belt and Road Initiative can improve the information disclosure quality of supported firms as it develops. Benefiting greatly from the reduction of information asymmetry between supported firms and outsiders, the bond yield spreads of supported firms are expected to decrease.
Another perspective is that the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative will increase the corporate bond yield spreads of supported firms. From the perspective of the external environment, the existence of credit risk, legal risk, sovereignty disputes, and other problems may make supported firms' bids to “go global” fail to achieve the expected results. From the perspective of internal operations, the Belt and Road projects focus on basic investments and involve large capital investments and a low rate of return. Therefore, there are several uncertainties for Belt and Road investments. Bond investors may think that the corporate bonds issued by supported firms have high default risk and thus demand high-risk compensation.
Based on the above analyses, this paper regards the Belt and Road Initiative as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a difference-in-differences model to investigate the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on corporate bond yield spreads. The empirical results show that the Belt and Road Initiative can significantly reduce the bond yield spreads of supported firms. Analyzing the reaction of the bond market, we find that supported firms have higher CARs for bonds after the Belt and Road Initiative. The channel analysis suggests that the Belt and Road Initiative decreases bond yield spreads through both resource and information effects. Specifically, supported firms receive more government subsidies and stronger support for tax preferences. Supported firms are also associated with a decrease in information asymmetry after the Belt and Road Initiative. Exploiting cross-sectional variation, we find that the negative effect of the Belt and Road Initiative on bond yield spreads is more pronounced for firms located in key industries or in key provinces. A further analysis shows that the Belt and Road Initiative can also reduce the issue price of corporate bonds in the primary market. Regarding nonprice terms, we conclude that after the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, supported firms are less likely to be subject to collateral terms and tend to have less restrictive covenants.
Compared with the literature, the three main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, this paper examines the effectiveness of the Belt and Road Initiative from the perspective of corporate bond yield spreads. The findings enrich the relevant literature on the consequences of the Belt and Road Initiative on micro-enterprises' financing behaviors and provides a theoretical basis and practical reference for Belt and Road policies at the bond level. Second, this paper echoes the relevant literature on policy support to provide a reference path for the government to better guide the development of enterprises with a “visible hand.” Third, this paper contributes to the factor influencing bond credit spreads by innovatively explaining the changes in corporate bond credit spreads from the perspective of the Belt and Road Initiative, which enriches the literature on macroeconomic policy and bond credit spreads.
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Received: 30 January 2019
Published: 01 April 2022
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