ورود به بانک های خارجی و دسترسی شرکت ها به اعتبار بانکی: شواهد از چین

This paper studies the impact of foreign bank entry on domestic firms’ access to bank credit using a within-country staggered geographic variation in the policy of foreign bank lending in China. The paper finds that after foreign bank entry profitable firms use more long-term bank loans; whereas firms with higher value of potential collateral do not. It also finds that non-state-owned firms become able to substitute some trade credit with long-term bank loans. The findings suggest that less opaque firms and non-state-owned firms benefit more from foreign bank entry and that collateral may only play a limited role in mitigating the problem of information asymmetry when creditors’ rights are not well protected in a host country.

Recently, many developing countries have allowed foreign banks access to domestic corporate borrowers with the belief that foreign bank competition may provide a greater supply of aggregate bank credit to all domestic borrowers and improve the efficiency of the banking system since foreign banks are able to overcome cross-border disadvantages and operate more efficiently than their domestic competitors. Moreover, to the extent that firms are financially constrained, an increase in the supply of aggregate bank credit can help firms finance more projects with positive NPV. However, due to the information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders, foreign bank entry may benefit only a certain type of borrowers. This paper revisits the relationship between foreign bank entry and domestic firms’ use of bank credit. It asks whether domestic firms use more bank credit after foreign bank entry and whether the impact of foreign bank entry varies with the firm heterogeneity. To answer these questions, this paper explores the consequences of a series of commitments on the banking sector liberalization that the Chinese government made upon accession to the WTO at the end of 2001. These commitments cause a geographic variation across regions in China regarding when foreign banks can conduct local-currency business with domestic firms located in the same region. As a result, during a given period firms across the country have different accesses to foreign bank credit. Furthermore, the timing and region choices were made by the central government and were unrelated to the firm-specific demand. Some recent studies (e.g., Cetorelli and Strahan, 2006, Zarutskie, 2006 and Bertrand et al., 2007) use a firm-level within-country variation to identify the impact of greater bank competition. A within-country variation can mitigate the endogeneity problem in the supply of foreign bank credit. This paper finds no significant change on average in either the incidence or the amount of long-term bank loans among publicly-traded non-financial firms in China. However, the results indicate that the impact of foreign bank entry varies with the firm heterogeneity: profitability, state ownership, and value of potential collateral. After foreign bank loans become available, profitable firms use more long-term bank loans (scaled by total assets in 2001) by 4.7% points and are more likely to have long-term bank loans by 8.5% than unprofitable firms. Furthermore, profitable firms increase sales and investment afterward, consistent with the hypothesis that firms are financially constrained, while unprofitable firms do not. As profitable firms are generally thought to be less opaque, the findings above are consistent with the hypothesis that less opaque firms benefit more from foreign bank entry. Non-state-owned firms also benefit more from foreign bank entry. Non-state-owned firms were disadvantaged in competing for the support of domestic bank credit. They had to use more expensive trade credit for both financing and transaction purposes. The results in the present paper indicate that non-state-owned firms decrease net trade credit (scaled by total assets in 2001) by 2.3% points after foreign bank loans become available. It suggests that foreign bank entry enables non-state-owned firms to substitute bank loans for some trade credit, also consistent with the hypothesis that firms are financially constrained. By contrast, firms with higher value of potential collateral have no incremental increase in long-term bank loans after foreign bank loans become available. To validate the identification assumption that foreign bank entry causes changes in the supply of bank loans, the paper tests for a pre-existing trend in the use of long-term bank loans by domestic firms. If changes in long-term bank loans started before foreign bank loans become available, it may be symptomatic of reverse causality and the changes cannot be attributed to foreign bank entry. The results show that the changes happen either after foreign bank entry or in the year of foreign bank entry. This paper adds to the literature that exploits a cross-country variation in foreign bank competition to investigate the relationship between bank competition and firm outcomes (e.g., Clarke et al., 2006, Giannetti and Ongena, 2007 and Detragiache et al., 2008).1 The paper also complements the growing empirical literature that studies the impact of foreign bank competition on domestic firms’ corporate finance and real outcomes in a within-country context (e.g., Berger et al., 2001, Haber and Musaccio, 2004 and Mian, 2006). A closely related paper is Gormley (2010). He studies the impact of foreign bank entry using the variation in the location of foreign banks in India following a change in India’s foreign bank lending policy. He finds that, on average, firms are less likely to get bank credit after the policy change, but profitable firms are more likely to secure bank credit. The present paper differs from his in one important dimension. Unlike India, the Chinese banking market was gradually liberated to foreign competition. Moreover, foreign banks in China were not able to choose freely where to lend local-currency loans to domestic firms. The change in the foreign bank lending policy directly causes a geographic variation in the supply of foreign bank loans, which facilitates the identification. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. The next section presents the institutional background and develops main hypotheses. Section 3 describes the data. Section 4 presents results and conducts robustness checks. Section 5 concludes.

This paper studies the impact of foreign bank entry on domestic firms’ access to bank credit. The staggered geographic variation in the policy of foreign bank lending in China offers a unique setting for identifying the casual relationship between foreign bank entry and domestic firms’ financing and real activities. It shows that, on average, foreign bank entry in its early stage does not have a significant impact on either the incidence or the amount of long-term bank loans among publicly-traded non-financial firms. However, the impact of foreign bank entry varies with firm heterogeneity: profitable firms use more long-term bank loans, supporting the portfolio composition hypothesis; non-state-owned firms become able to substitute more expensive trade credit with long-term bank loans; however, firms with higher value of potential collateral do not use more bank loans after foreign bank entry. In conclusion, the findings in this paper suggest that the banking sector liberalization policy on foreign bank lending helps alleviate financial constraints of firms, especially those that are less connected to the government. It, to some extent, helps reduce the inefficiency in resource allocation due to state-owned banks’ discrimination against non-state-owned firms in bank lending.