定向降准、贷款可得性与小微企业商业信用——基于断点回归的经验证据

小微企业在我国经济发展中起到了重要作用,但由于长期面临融资约束问题,使其不得不诉诸非正式制度(如商业信用)来缓解融资困难。党的十九届五中全会明确提出,支持小微企业成长为创新重要发源地,完善促进小微企业发展的政策体系。其中,实施“精准滴灌”式的货币政策,对小微企业成长尤为重要,是金融服务实体经济的必然要求。我国央行的定向降准政策激励银行向小微企业提供贷款,有利于疏通小微企业通过正式制度(如银行贷款)进行融资的渠道。本文基于定向降准这一自然实验,采用断点回归设计,评估贷款可得性对小微企业商业信用的影响。研究发现:第一,正式制度对于非正式制度存在明显的替代效应,即小微企业贷款可得性上升以后,对商业信用的需求显著下降。第二,不同的模型设定与稳健性检验,均得到一致的结论。第三,贷款可得性提高对小微企业商业信用的影响因企业异质性而有所差异。本文研究为银行贷款与商业信用之间的替代关系提供了来自中国小微企业的证据,有助于理解定向降准政策对小微企业融资决策的影响,为扶持小微企业发展的政策制定提供参考。

Targeted RRR Cuts,Loan Availability,and the Trade Credit of SMEs:Evidence Based on Regression Discontinuity Design

The smooth operation, transformation, and upgrade of the Chinese economy inevitably requires the comprehensive development of small and micro enterprises (SMEs). However, financing difficulties have severely restricted the growth of SMEs, causing them to resort to informal channels (such as trade credit) to obtain funds. The Fifth Plenary Session of the Nineteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed to support the growth and transformation of SMEs into an important cradle of innovation and to improve policy to promote the development of SMEs. Among these efforts, the implementation of “precise drip irrigation” monetary policy is particularly important for the growth of SMEs and will help to further strengthen the function of financial services in the real economy. To encourage commercial banks and other financial institutions to provide more credit to SMEs and unblock the more formal channels (such as bank loans) through which SMEs can obtain financing, the People's Bank of China, China's central bank, began to implement targeted reserve requirement ratio cuts (TRRRCs) in June 2014.In contrast to traditional “one size fits all” policies, TRRRCs lower the deposit reserve ratio for commercial banks and other financial institutions. This led to new loans to SMEs accounting for more than 50% of all new loans in 2020 in an attempt to incentivize the allocation of credit resources to weak yet important economic sectors such as SMEs. Therefore, TRRRCs are essentially a quantitative easing tool to improve access to finance for SMEs specifically. While many studies have evaluated the effectiveness of TRRRCs, due to data availability and causal identification strategies, there is scant research evaluating the impact of TRRRCs on SMEs' other financing channels, such as trade credit, which is as important as bank loans for SMEs when obtaining funds. TRRRCs exert a significant influence on loan availability for SMEs whose sales fall below specific cutoffs. We can thus employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) and use the generated variation in loan availability to identify the impact of access to finance on the trade credit of SMEs. We conduct this RDD using the National Equities Exchange and Quotation's (NEEQ) financial disclosures data from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database. The results indicate that the demand for trade credit decreased significantly after the availability of loans for SMEs increased in response to TRRRCs. Furthermore, the allocation of bank loans is often consistent with the value discovery function of the bank. Banks can grant credit to high-quality companies and exert a supervisory function. Therefore, TRRRCs mainly improve loan availability for firms with fewer financial constraints and better market performance. The negative impact of loan availability on trade credit mainly exists among high-quality SMEs. The results are robust after choosing a different bandwidth, controlling for firm characteristics, sharpening the RDD, and excluding other sources of policy interference.The contributions of this study are as follows. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the effect of TRRRCs on SMEs' financing decisions. Moreover, the decision to obtain bank loans and trade credit for corporate financing is generally determined by various factors, and this may generate an endogeneity problem. By policy design, TRRRCs only target SMEs whose sales fall below a threshold. If the policy indeed changes loan availability, two kinds of firms whose sales are on the opposite side of the threshold but are otherwise similar will have different levels of financial access. Under this condition, we can use RDD to identify the impact of access to finance on trade credit. The results provide evidence that the substitution relationship between bank loans and trade credit dominates China's SMEs, which enriches the literature on the impact of monetary policy on corporate financing.This study has clear policy implications. First, since TRRRCs improve SMEs' loan availability, this policy could be employed to ease the financing constraints on SMEs. Second, our results indicate that SMEs with fewer financial constraints decrease their trade credit due to the substitution of bank loans. Credit rationing leads to formal credit resources flowing into high-quality firms. Thus, policy makers are expected to introduce innovative financial policy tools that directly reach the real economy, in particular to help SMEs with severe financing difficulties.One limitation of this study is that the sample is composed of firms listed on the NEEQ. However, SMEs are found throughout China. Improvements to China's financial information disclosure regulations and the development of data collection and storage capabilities will allow a more representative sample of the financing decision-making issues facing SMEs to be assessed in future research.