融资约束差异会提高企业金融化水平吗?——来自我国A股上市非金融企业的经验证据

目前,我国越来越多实体企业偏离主业,将资金投入金融等收益率高的部门,出现经济的“脱实向虚”现象,一定程度上阻碍了实体经济的发展。本文基于2009—2018年我国非金融类A股上市公司数据,研究融资约束与企业金融化之间的关系。研究发现:融资约束与企业金融化之间存在显著的负向关系,受融资约束越小的企业,配置越多的金融资产,提高了企业金融化水平。进一步研究发现,融资约束与短期、长期金融资产之间均存在显著的负向关系,但与长期金融资产之间的负向关系更加明显。在受融资约束小和非国有企业的样本中,融资约束对企业金融化的影响程度更大。作用机制检验表明,企业业绩是融资约束影响企业金融化的中介变量。     

金融行业对实体行业的尾部风险传导研究——基于实体企业金融化视角

本文基于我国金融资本超额回报率的事实,在市场套利分析框架下实证检验了实 体企业金融化是抑制还是加剧了尾部金融风险溢出。数值模拟结果表明：从杠杆率来看,实体 企业金融化对杠杆率具有“双刃剑”效应,然而,实证结果发现,从长期经济后果来看,实体 企业金融化却显著提高了杠杆率,基于Altman-Z值的风险分析进一步发现企业破产风险显著 上升,从而加剧了尾部金融风险溢出。文章的研究结论有利于全面观察实体企业金融化带来的 的实际效果,也揭示了金融行业对实体行业的风险传导过程中的一个风险源,对于实体经济和 金融领域关于企业金融化效应的研究具有参考价值。     

企业金融化与劳动收入份额变动

本文从企业金融化的角度解释了上市公司劳动收入份额的变动,虽然基准结果显示,企业金融化能够促进劳动收入份额提升,但基于欧拉方程分解和中介变量法的验证发现,企业金融化一方面对工资水平产生正向溢出并提升了劳动收入份额,即表现出“盈利溢出”效应;另一方面,企业金融化却会抑制企业劳动生产率的改进,客观上造成劳动要素在生产中的地位上升进而带来劳动收入份额的提升,即表现出“技术抑制”效应。进一步分析发现,高管的劳动收入份额获益幅度小于普通员工(私营企业中更明显),说明经典的“委托-代理”框架并不能有效地解释中国企业的金融化行为;与此同时,企业金融化的影响和金融市场收益率具有强相关性,表明企业金融化的动力来自金融市场的收益激励。本文研究结论表明,企业金融化是企业在金融市场超额收益时期的“理性选择”,伴随金融市场回归并运行在合理区间,企业金融化对劳动收入份额的提升作用不仅不可持续,而且会对劳动生产率产生持续损害,借助趋利性的企业金融化来获得劳动收入份额的提升无异于“饮鸩止渴”。本文的研究结论可为我国进一步深化金融体系供给侧结构性改革,引导金融回归本源,更好地服务于实体经济提供有益参考。     

Evidence of algorithmic trading from Indian equity market: Interpreting the transaction velocity element of financialization

Technology and innovation have been the driving forces behind financialization across the globe. One such technological advent, in the pursuit for minimizing the risk and maximizing the return and in order to adhere to the financial sector changes, is Algorithmic Trading (AT). Though AT is being used extensively across the world, there is a lack of academic research on the evidence of AT in most of the markets. The lack of evidence stems from the ambiguity in definitions of AT and High Frequency Trading (HFT) and their usage interchangeably. The lack of evidence also hinders the understanding and interpretation of the impact of ever-increasing unprecedented growth in the velocity of financial transactions on the social machinery of global economies. We take advantage of the clear definition and identification of AT in the Indian equity market to provide evidence of AT and interpreting it as the transaction velocity element of financialization. We also attempt to decipher the impact of AT, symbolizing the transaction velocity element of financialization, on the price discovery process.     

Intelligent finance—an emerging direction

Intelligent finance represents a new direction recently emerging from the confluence of several distinct disciplines in financial market analysis, investing and trading, removing any historical or artificial barrier between them. It is conceived as the science, technology and art of the comprehensive, predictive, dynamic and strategic analysis of global financial markets, towards a unification and integration of academic finance and professional finance. As a comprehensive approach, it is a quest for absolute positive and non-trivial returns in investing and trading by exploiting complete information about financial markets from all general perspectives, drawing ideas, theories, models and techniques from many related academic disciplines, such as macroeconomics, microeconomics, academic finance, financial mathematics, econophysics, behavioural finance and computational finance, and from professional schools of thought, such as macrowave investing, trend following, fundamental analysis, technical analysis, mind analysis, active speculation, etc. In terms of risk management, intelligent finance is expected to minimize the very last risk—the incompleteness of an investing or trading method or system. The theoretical framework of intelligent finance consists of four major components: financial information fusion, multilevel stochastic dynamic process models, active portfolio and total risk management, and financial strategic analysis. We first provide the background from which intelligent finance has recently emerged as a new direction in finance research and industry, and then provide a brief theoretical review of the predictability of financial markets since Bachelier. After these background discussions, we clarify the major research directions of intelligent finance.     

Making sense and transparency in finance literature: Evidence from trends in readability

Transparency continues to interest finance scholarship, as regards not just to financial reporting, but to a host of areas. Concomitantly, there is a growing emphasis on the transparency of the finance research process, with journals initiating requirements for uploading data and codes. However, little consideration is given to the transparency of finance scholarly texts, despite new emphasis by academic institutions and accreditation bodies on articles having an impact on practitioners. We use textual analysis to investigate the readability of articles in a selection of finance journals. Results evidence that academic articles are becoming less readable. Whether readability straightforwardly implies transparency is unclear, still, we consider these issues alongside our findings. Our study should be of great interest to those concerned with the state of finance scholarship.     

Financialization as a strategy of workplace control in professional service firms

Recently, there has been an increased focus on finance as a form of control in corporations. In this paper, we explore financialization as an employee control strategy in a Big Four accountancy firm, and more specifically how it affects the everyday lives of the professionals within the firm. We found financialization involved attempts to transform employees working lives into an investment activity where work was experienced as ‘billable hours’ that are ‘invested’ in the hope of a high future pay-off. Employees sought to increase the value of their investment by skilful manipulation. If wisely managed, this investment could yield significant benefits in the future. We argue that financialization involves active employee participation and is a way of binding other forms of control together.     

Peer effects in financial economics: A literature survey

The paper reviews the growing literature on peer effects in finance from theoretical and empirical viewpoints. In particular, we assess the importance of peer behavior on firms’ financial policies, analyze the channels through which they operate, and gauge their magnitude. We particularly review empirical works on herding and peer effects in two subfields of finance: corporate finance and the financial markets. We also discuss the results of many relevant peer-reviewed academic studies and provide research and policy implications. The main conclusion is that peer effects are important in shaping investor and firm decisions. The most critical problem in the peer effect literature is employing an identification strategy to ensure that results are not driven by endogeneity. The paper also discusses ways to address this identification issue and provides a future research agenda.     

Financialization and Corporate Performance in China: Promotion or Inhibition?

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms for the period 2009 to 2018, we analyze the relationship between the financialization of non-financial corporations (NFCs) and corporate performance from both long-term and short-term perspectives. Our results show that the impact of financialization on firm performance is not simply a crowding-out or pulling effect but rather depends on the type of financial assets held by the firms. The holdings of investment financial assets generally have a pulling effect on both the short-term performance and market expectations of a firm's future profits as proxied by Tobin's Q, but they crowd out the innovation activities that are critical to long-term performance. Although monetary financial assets positively affect corporate profitability, they inhibit the increase of return on invested capital and long-term performance. Additionally, compared with monetary financial assets, investment financial assets play a more important role in promoting short-term performance, although the crowding-out effect on innovation activities is more prominent for investment financial assets. Furthermore, this paper also concludes that compared with manufacturing and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs), the role of financialization in promoting the performance of non-manufacturing and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is more significant.     

Risk–Return Profiles of Islamic Equities and Commodity Portfolios in Different Market Conditions

Motivated by the recent phenomenal growth in Islamic finance and the financialization of commodities, this study makes an initial attempt to investigate the risk–return profiles of optimized portfolios combining (a) Islamic equities with commodities and (b) conventional equities with commodities during the crises and noncrises periods. The findings tend to indicate that Islamic equity–commodity portfolios provide relatively higher diversification benefits than the conventional equity–commodity portfolios during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis triggered by the financial sector compared to the 2008 global financial crisis triggered by the real housing sector. The findings further suggest that except for a few cases, commodities in general and gold in particular improve diversification benefits.     

正规金融与非正规金融:机制、效率与实证挑战

正规金融与非正规金融的定位和关系,不仅是重要的学术问题,也是影响间接金融体系改革方向的关键。本文从机制视角建立学理框架,从信息和履约两个基础维度,讨论正规金融与非正规金融的相对效率及决定因素,并通过系统梳理相关文献,指出现有实证研究的成果与挑战;进而结合中国特征,讨论如何提高正规金融与非正规金融的效率,最后提出未来研究方向。本文认为,正规金融与非正规金融因信息和履约机制不同而各有其独立存在价值,其相对效率取决于不同经济发展阶段的社会网络基础和征信、法律体系,现有实证文献对两者作用的分歧主要源于分类、样本局限和内生性处理。本文从机制视角进行分析,体现了正规金融和非正规金融的金融属性,为探索相关领域学术研究和政策制定提供启示。     

放松利率管制、利润率均等化与实体企业“脱实向虚”

本文以我国贷款利率上下限放开为准自然实验,基于产权性质差异构造双重差分模型,实证考察放松利率管制如何影响实体企业金融化。研究发现:放松贷款利率下限管制能够显著抑制非国有企业金融化程度,而放松贷款利率上限管制则无显著作用,支持了“市场套利观”。机制检验发现贷款利率下限管制的放松显著抑制企业债务成本对企业利润的侵蚀作用;拓展性检验还发现对于盈利能力越强、规模越大以及市场竞争压力越小的公司,放松贷款利率下限管制对抑制非国有企业金融化的作用更显著。以上研究结论表明,实体经济与虚拟经济间的利润率差距是我国实体企业金融化的重要诱因,金融市场化改革有助于抑制实体企业金融化、改善“实体经济”与“虚拟经济”间的良性互动关系,从而助推实体经济的健康发展。     

普惠金融视角下农村金融发展与改革研究

农村金融服务是“三农”发展必不可少的条件。普惠金融作为一种新理念,是解决“三农”信贷不足、信贷不公等问题的关键,但我国农村金融存在严重的非普惠性。通过构建普惠金融体系,贯彻金融公平理念、实现金融全面创新和全面履行金融社会责任,以金融公平为导向扩大农村金融服务覆盖面,以金融创新为导向提升金融服务“三农”质量,以金融责任为导向保证农村普惠金融的可持续性,实现农村金融资源的普惠性公平配置,促进农村经济社会和谐发展。     

Capital and income financialization: Accounting for the 2008 financial crisis

Financialization is recognised as a key feature of the 2008 financial crisis. We argue that a lesson is the need for an accounting framework which focuses upon financialization allowing it to be monitored and controlled by stakeholders. We argue that financialization has been permitted through the failure of accounting to distinguish distributable income from capital gains/transfers and to distinguish productive from speculative capital. We introduce an accounting presentation (4S accounting) which effectively makes these distinctions. We use a stylized example to illustrate how it should be applied to the financial reporting of banks.     

Are zombie firms more incentivized to financialize?

This paper investigates whether zombie firms demonstrate a tendency to invest in the financial sector, a practice we term financialization strategy. Unlike those in the United States, Japan, and Europe, we find that zombie firms in China are not necessarily small and that they rely heavily on government subsidies in addition to bank loans for survival. In addition, we document that zombie firms in China experience limited investment opportunities in their core businesses. This combination of readily available funding and limited investment opportunities jointly motivate the financialization of firms with zombie status. We further find that financialization is preferred by non-state-owned firms and by those located in regions with less developed markets. Finally, we suggest that a contagion effect can occur in terms of financialization in provinces that have a high percentage of zombie firms. This research sheds light on the effects of a triangular relationship among firms, government agencies, and financial institutions on both the operations of individual firms and overall market efficiency.     

宏观审慎政策如何影响企业金融化?

本文分析了宏观审慎政策对企业金融化的影响及其传导机制,研究发现,宏观审慎政策通过限制银行信贷影响企业从事投资活动的资金来源,进而抑制企业的金融投资。这一过程可以概括为"宏观审慎政策-银行信贷-企业金融化"。本文以2000-2016年沪深两市A股非金融行业上市公司的年度财务数据为样本,进行实证分析,结果表明,宏观审慎政策能够显著降低非金融企业的金融投资增长率,有利于抑制企业金融化趋势,回归主营业务,避免经济脱实向虚。考察不同的宏观审慎工具,本文发现,相比于准备金要求,贷款价值比工具对降低企业金融投资增长率的作用更显著。本文通过中介效应检验,验证了银行信贷是宏观审慎政策影响企业金融化的部分中介变量,其中介效应在总效应中占比约为20%。     

Does the social security fund help non-financial enterprises to transform from the virtual to the real?

At its 19th National Congress, the Communist Party of China vowed to “strengthen the financial sector’s ability to serve the real economy.” However, many studies provide evidence of the opposite trend, a problematic “transition from the real to the virtual,” among Chinese enterprises. Meanwhile, the investment efficiency of China’s Social Security Fund (SSF), a public fund, attracts much attention. In this context, we use A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2018 to study the relationship between holding by the SSF and enterprise financialization. We find that SSF holding significantly inhibits financialization and that this effect is non-linear. Mechanism analysis indicates that SSF holding suppresses enterprises’ financialization mainly by improving their governance. Moreover, SSF holding more strongly inhibits small-scale (vs. large-scale), state-owned (vs. non-state-owned), and non-eastern (vs. eastern) enterprises in China. Furthermore, SSF holding can alleviate corporate value impairment caused by financialization. The conclusions enrich theoretical research and provide empirical evidence that may help regulatory authorities to guide investment by enterprises and prevent financial risks.     

Public and private enforcement of securities laws: Resource-based evidence

Ascertaining which enforcement mechanisms work to protect investors has been both a focus of recent work in academic finance and an issue for policy-making at international development agencies. According to recent academic work, private enforcement of investor protection via both disclosure and private liability rules goes hand in hand with financial market development, but public enforcement fails to correlate with financial development and, hence, is unlikely to facilitate it. Our results confirm the disclosure result but reverse the results on both liability standards and public enforcement. We use securities regulators’ resources to proxy for regulatory intensity of the securities regulator. When we do, financial depth regularly, significantly, and robustly correlates with stronger public enforcement. In horse races between these resource-based measures of public enforcement intensity and the most common measures of private enforcement, public enforcement is overall as important as disclosure in explaining financial market outcomes around the world and more important than private liability rules. Hence, policymakers who reject public enforcement as useful for financial market development are ignoring the best currently available evidence.     

A Model of Financialization of Commodities

We analyze how institutional investors entering commodity futures markets, referred to as the financialization of commodities, affect commodity prices. Institutional investors care about their performance relative to a commodity index. We find that all commodity futures prices, volatilities, and correlations go up with financialization, but more so for index futures than for nonindex futures. The equity‐commodity correlations also increase. We demonstrate how financial markets transmit shocks not only to futures prices but also to commodity spot prices and inventories. Spot prices go up with financialization, and shocks to any index commodity spill over to all storable commodity prices.     

Digital finance and corporate financial fraud

Corporate financial fraud harms the interests of investors and affects the healthy development of the capital market. Understanding corporate financial fraud has important academic value and practical significance. Digital finance been rapidly developing over the past few years and scholars are investigating strategies for using digital finance as a tool to curb corporate financial fraud. This paper empirically examines the direct effect, intrinsic mechanism, and heterogeneous effect of digital finance on corporate financial fraud based on panel data of A-share listed corporations in China from 2011 to 2020. Results show that digital finance significantly inhibits corporate financial fraud. The breadth of coverage and depth of usage within digital finance show inhibitory effects on corporate financial fraud. This suggests that a combination of coverage and depth is needed to improve the success of digital finance on corporate financial fraud. The internal mechanisms suggest that digital finance inhibits corporate financial fraud by alleviating financing constraints, reducing corporate leverage, and decreasing agency costs. The heterogeneity analysis shows digital finance has a greater inhibitory effect for large-scale corporates, state-owned corporates, and corporates in areas with low degree of marketization. Our findings can provide reference for financial institutions, investors, analysts, and regulators to improve the quality of decision-making.