Bank Structure,Debt Financing And Corporate Innovation

Enterprises' innovation activities are the important driving factors to achieve the sustainable regional economy and one country's economic development, promote the industrial upgrading and enhance their core competitiveness. Among them, the innovation investment(R&D) of the enterprise is the source to carry out innovation activities, and also the most direct power to promote the innovation. Enterprises in developed countries such as Germany, Japan and the United States have always given a high priority to R&D investment. In addition, these countries often carry out necessary blocking and controls on the innovative technologies, thus to protect their international leading positions. Therefore, in this era of knowledge economy when the trend of globalization has gone intensified, if they expect to stand out from the competitions full of bullets, our enterprises must implement the innovation activities with their own sustainable and guaranteed R&D investment, thus to help themselves to achieve the breakthrough in the product innovation and form a stronger core competitiveness.In most cases, enterprises' R&D activities require a long-term sustainable investment, therefore, whether they have enough R&D funding is the most important guarantee to carry out the innovation activities. However, due to factors of the natural high risks for enterprises' R&D investment and the associated information asymmetry, enterprises' financing to carry out R&D activities would be influenced by many internal and external factors. Although there's the issue of financing pecking orders within enterprises' R&D activities, its specificity makes banks' financial support become increasingly important. In our financial system dominated by banks, it has been a tough issue waiting to be solved in the academic circle on how enterprises could gain banks' support for their R&D activities within this gradually formed pluralistic banking structure and system, and also a problem needing to be faced in the process of building an innovative country.Based on the realistic background that the competition in the banking industry has been intensified in the economic transition period, this paper discusses the current structure of the banking sector, as well as different types of banks' impacts on enterprises' R&D investment and the mechanism of action. We take the A-share listed companies between 2007 and 2014 as the study samples and gain the following conclusion: compared with large state-owned banks, joint-stock commercial banks, urban commercial banks and new-type rural finance could actually make for enterprises' R&D investment and improve the innovation strength; the market share increase of joint-stock commercial banks has expanded the scale of enterprises' debt financing and reduced the cost of enterprises' debt financing, and by these two paths the financing constraints within enterprises' innovation projects get relieved, thus increasing enterprises' R &D investment; urban commercial banks and new-type rural finance has expanded the scale of enterprises' debt financing, and have a positive effect on enterprises' R &D investment; in addition, this impact is more reflected in private enterprises. More significantly, the competitive banking structure is in favor of promoting enterprises' R &D investment, which is one important evidence that the open banking sector could promote economic growth under the background that China's economic development has entered a new normal state.