产能治理与企业债务结构再平衡—基于商业信用与银行信贷关系视角

我国上市制造业企业的商业信用与银行信贷关系存在长期互补特征,但信号理论对互补强度的演变过程缺乏有效的解释力.为探索信号理论之外的互补机制,反思企业债务结构的信贷偏移效应,文章提出了产能驱动假说,利用面板门限模型,得到了以下结论:(1)商业信用与银行信贷会随产能增长而呈现从"替代"到"互补"的演变特征,且互补强度(单位商业信用上升伴随的信贷上升)会随产能膨胀出现从"弱"到"强"的二次突变特征,即产能扭曲会使企业债务结构快速向银行信贷偏移,这为理解企业信贷依赖的形成路径提供了产能层面的微观解释.(2)企业债务结构再平衡能力具有异质性,高研发投资及低调整成本企业借助产能治理来修正信贷依赖的能力更强,因此降低调整成本、扶植企业创新应成为优化融资结构的重要政策路径.文章在信号理论之外提出了产能驱动假说,解释了我国企业债务结构扭曲的动态特征,并从技术创新与调整成本视角为推动企业实现债务结构再平衡提供了政策参考.

Capacity Governance and Rebalance of Debt Structure:From the Perspective of the Relationship between Trade Credit and Bank Credit

During the period of 2003-2015,the relationship of trade credit and bank credit financing of Chinese industrial enterprises above a designated size showed a significant "complementary" growth pattern, being in sharp contrast to the extrude expectation under traditional "alternative financing" theory. Although the complementary patter can be explained by traditional "signaling theory",this theory still does not sufficiently explain why trade credit grows in units combing with much more growth of bank credit,and why enterprise debt structure increasingly skews towards bank credit,especially when the GFC led the bank sector to a re-newed bout of risk aversion and reduced the willingness of commercial banks to identify the "signaling effect".The above background determines the following research tasks. Firstly,in addition to the western "signal-ing effect" hypothesis,how to construct a new complementation logic (e.g. capacity-driven hypothesis) is studied to explain why the relationship between bank credit and trade credit is dynamically transformed from substitution to complementation,and why bank credit,instead of being crowding out,eventually takes on more radical growth,which in turn leads to firm debt structure shifting toward bank loans. These introspections con-tribute to the localization interpretation of corporate debt structure distortion as well as to the formation mech-anism of the rising level of bank credit dependence. Secondly,by observing the evolution characteristics (e.g. threshold value,magnitude of complementation coefficient) of corporate debt structure imbalance through subgroup tests and comparing their coefficient differences,the determinants which are able to adjust firms' bank credit dependence and rebalance firm debt structure can be found out. These introspections contribute to the optimization of credit policies that aim to optimize firm debt structure,and correct firms' bank credit distortion. On the basis of a literature review and the introspection of complementary logic,this paper puts forward the "capacity-driven hypothesis",and investigates the determinants of firm debt structure distortion by introdu-cing adjustment cost and R&D innovation. Using the data of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2003 to 2014, we develop a panel threshold model (Hansen,1999) and obtain the following conclusions:firstly,the relation-ship between trade credit financing and bank credit financing is dynamically transformed from substitution to complementation when a firm's production capacity goes beyond the first threshold γ1,and the complementa-tion coefficient (the bank credit changes corresponding to the trade credit growth in unit) moves forward to a higher level when capacity level goes beyond the second threshold γ2. The second "forward mutation" of com-plementation coefficient means that further capacity distortion makes corporate debt structure quickly shift to bank credit,which in turn contributes,from the perspective of capacity governance,to the understanding of the formation mechanism of firms' bank credit dependence. Secondly,the rebalance ability of firm debt structure varies with types of firms. More specifically,firms with high R&D investment or lower adjustment costs are more capable of adjusting debt structure distortion and reducing their dependence on bank credit by imple-menting capacity governance. This subgroup test result reveals that our macro policy,with the intention of cor-recting debt structure distortion,has to renew the concern about innovation incentive and adjustment cost smoothing. The potential contributions of this paper are:(1)it has implications for complementation theory and helps to understand the micro-mechanism and transformation condition (threshold reference) of debt structure dy-namics in the context of the Chinese economy by proposing the "capacity-driven hypothesis" (rather than tra-ditional signaling hypothesis);(2) it reveals,through the introspection and empirical subgroup test,the im-pacts of R&D investment and adjustment costs on reducing offset of financial structure. This facilitates the op-timization of credit policy.