Construction Of Social Credit System And Enterprise Financing Constraints

Credit is the cornerstone of market economy.Economic development needs to establish a trust relationship between market economic entities,and credit culture is an important cornerstone of this trust relationship.It can not only promote fair competition among investors,but also provide high-quality services,reduce social costs,and promote economic development.In 2014,the State Council issued the Outline of the Social Credit System Construction Plan(2014-2020),which aims to improve the integrity awareness and credit level of the whole society.Private enterprises are faced with difficult and expensive financing problems,and good credit will help enterprises to obtain external financing and ease enterprise financing constraints.At present,the trend of anti-globalization is rising,and the uncertainty of the world economy is further increasing,which exacerbates the degree of financing constraints faced by enterprises.Although there are many scholars at home and abroad studying financing constraints at present,they are mainly based on the developed western capital markets,and there are few literatures on financing constraints based on the special background of China’s system.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the financing constraints based on the construction of social credit system.This paper combs the achievements of the construction of social credit system in detail,and summarizes them into two aspects: first,establish a credit data center and provide credit sharing services;second,vigorously promote the credit culture and implement the joint reward and punishment mechanism.Through reviewing the existing literature on financing constraints,it is found that the fundamental reasons affecting financing constraints are information asymmetry and agency costs.Through analysis,this paper believes that: first,the construction of social credit system can play the role of credit information sharing through credit data center and credit sharing service,provide more sufficient information,help to reduce information asymmetry,and thus alleviate enterprise financing constraints;Second,the construction of the social credit system strengthens the function of corporate governance by promoting the integrity culture and the joint reward and punishment mechanism,and restrains the misbehavior of the management,which helps to reduce the agency cost,thus easing the enterprise financing constraints.Therefore,this paper puts forward the hypothesis that "the construction of social credit system alleviates corporate financing constraints".This paper uses the pilot project of China’s social credit system construction reform as a quasi-natural experiment,and takes the listed companies in China’s prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2020 as the research sample.First of all,using the progressive double difference model and WW index as the indicator to measure the financing constraints,the paper examines the impact of China’s social credit system construction on corporate financing constraints,and also through parallel trend chart,placebo test,replacement of core variables The robustness of the regression results was tested by adding control variables and adding fixed effects.Secondly,the information asymmetry is measured by earnings management and stock price synchronization,and the agency cost is measured by the tunneling of major shareholders and operating expense rate,and the mechanism of information asymmetry and agency cost is analyzed.Thirdly,we use the external financing dependence and marketization degree of the industry to analyze the heterogeneity.Finally,analyze the specific financing channels with short-term debt financing and long-term debt financing.The main research conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)The research found that the construction of social credit system can alleviate the financing constraints of enterprises,and the above conclusions are still valid after a series of robustness tests.(2)The mechanism analysis shows that the construction of social credit system is to reduce the information asymmetry and agency costs,thus easing the enterprise financing constraints.(3)The heterogeneity test shows that the construction of social credit system has a more obvious positive impact on the financing constraints of enterprises with strong dependence on industry financing and low degree of local marketization.(4)In terms of specific financing channels,the role of social credit system construction is mainly reflected in helping enterprises obtain more short-term debt financing,but its impact on long-term debt financing is not obvious.This paper provides reliable empirical evidence and policy implications for the government and enterprises to promote the construction of social credit system and ease the financing constraints of enterprises.This paper puts forward the following suggestions for the effect of long-term debt financing is not obvious: First,expand the source of credit data,and more accurately evaluate the credit of market economic entities;Second,make full use of blockchain technology to solve the credit problem at the technical level;Third,cultivate well-known credit rating agencies to play an important role in the capital market;Fourth,we should improve the joint punishment mechanism for dishonesty and the joint incentive mechanism for honesty,reward honesty and punish dishonesty;Fifth,create a strong atmosphere of honesty and credit and make the culture of honesty and credit deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.