金融政策竞争中性与民营企业融资纾困——来自突发公共卫生事件的准自然实验

本文以新冠肺炎疫情这一突发公共卫生事件为准自然实验,选择疫情前后我国债券市场数据,研究金融政策竞争中性原则实现情况及其途径。研究发现,相比国有企业,民营企业融资成本在疫情期间明显降低,金融政策的竞争中性得到进一步体现;那些为供应链上下游提供商业信用支持的民营企业,其融资成本降低幅度更大。同时,疫情期间一些应急性融资工具也向民营企业倾斜,更有利于降低民营企业的融资成本。进一步检验发现,供应链上下游受影响程度越严重、为上下游提供的商业信用期限越长,民营企业的融资成本降低幅度越大;疫情期间的金融政策并没有导致民营企业出现“脱实向虚”现象,反而降低了其金融化水平、提升了资金使用效率。研究结果显示,对民营企业不愿贷、不敢贷的现象并不等于金融政策存在非竞争中性,而是源于金融机构在执行层面的顾虑,我国应对突发公共卫生事件推出的金融政策有效缓解了信贷市场执行层面的这一顾虑。本文研究结论从金融政策竞争中性出发,为给民营企业营造公平竞争环境提供了有益启示。

Competitive Neutrality and Non-State-Owned Enterprises'Access to Debt Financing:A Quasi-Natural Experiment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Competitive neutrality involves maintaining a level playing field for competition between public (SOE) and private (non-SOE) enterprises, such that they follow the same rules when competing for business. However, in China commercial banks are the principal players in the credit market, and they commonly practice credit discrimination when they implement financial policies, which is a deviation from competitive neutrality. As such, prior research clearly recognizes that in comparison to SOEs, non-SOEs are at a substantial disadvantage when accessing the credit market. In response to COVID-19 shock, China introduced a series of financial policies to provide increased monetary and credit support to real sectors, especially to non-SOEs. Thus, we explore whether and how such financial policies affect competitive neutrality following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which represents a unique exogenous experimental scenario.We use a sample of medium-term notes and commercial papers issued around the time of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to conduct difference-in-differences tests of the realization of competitive neutrality via financial policy. We find that compared with SOEs, non-SOEs experience a significantly larger reduction in the costs of debt financing during the pandemic period, which suggests that government intervention leads to improved competitive neutrality. Our analyses also show that the reduction in debt-financing costs for non-SOEs is proportional to the amount of trade credit they provide to their partners along the supply chain. Thus, the supply of trade credit by key non-SOEs to other non-SOEs along the supply chain reduces the COVID-19 pandemic-generated financial constraints on these other non-SOEs, thereby serving as an important mechanism to promote the realization of financial policy that ensures competitive neutrality. Furthermore, we find that the supportive financial policies implemented during the pandemic period reduce non-SOEs' level of financialization and improve their efficiency of fund utilization.Our study makes several contributions. First, it explores an important approach to achieving competitive neutrality via financial policy. Our findings indicate that the credit discrimination against non-SOEs that previous studies document results not from the financial policies themselves, but from commercial banks' partial implementation of these financial policies. These findings highlight better ways to realize competitive neutrality via financial policy.Second, our study contributes to research on credit discrimination and ownership discrimination. Our findings suggest that the financial policies promulgated by the central bank and other institutes effectively improve the financing environment for non-SOEs during the pandemic period, and the resultant financial support to non-SOEs does not result in resource misallocation or the inefficient use of raised funds. In fact, the improved financing environment for non-SOEs significantly alleviates the credit and ownership discrimination that they usually experience in the debt market.Third, our study enriches understanding of the complementary relationship between commercial credit and bank debt. We find that a non-SOE’s financial support of its non-SOE trade partners along the supply chain serves as a positive signal, which increases the probability that these trade partners will obtain loans from commercial banks on favorable terms in the event of extreme shocks. Fourth, our study provides insights into the financial risks embedded within the financial system, which should be monitored by regulators. For example, although the supply of commercial credit may enable non-SOE trading partners along the entire supply chain to obtain financial support and assist financial institutions in implementing policies to ensure competitive neutrality and maintaining controllable levels of credit risks, there is also a risk that this supply may generate contagious financial distress. That is, if non-SOEs in the supply chain default on their loans or declare bankruptcy, this may have a spillover effect on the entire supply chain, leading in extreme cases to financial crisis.