Bank Expansion,Financing Constraints And Corporate Human Capital Structure

The accumulation of human capital is an important source for the economy to maintain healthy growth,and it is also the key for enterprises to absorb advanced technologies to cultivate their core competitiveness.Effectively absorbing highly educated labor and highly skilled labor can not only increase the rate of return on personal education,improve enterprise production and operation efficiency,but also promote the realization of talent-driven and innovation-driven development of China’s economy.The capital-skill complementarity hypothesis holds that the expansion of physical capital investment will lead to an increase in the demand for skilled labor and a decline in the demand for unskilled labor,and this feature allows financial market friction to be passed on to the labor market.China’s financial system is dominated by the banking industry.The difficulty and high cost of direct equity financing make bank credit as the main financing channel for domestic non-financial enterprises.The branches and outlets of commercial banks in various places are important carriers for providing credit products and services to enterprises.China has issued a series of deregulation policies,including allowing city commercial banks to operate in different places and not limiting the number of branches of small and medium commercial banks,which has led to a gradual increase in the degree of marketization of banking industry.A series of studies on the influence of bank expansion on the micro-production and operation of enterprises have achieved fruitful research results in domestic and foreign literatures.However,the research perspectives mainly focus on the impact on the growth and productivity of enterprises,enterprise investment behavior and investment efficiency,enterprise export behavior and R&D innovation.Few studies link the development and reform of banks in the financial market with the employment behavior of enterprises in the labor market.Taking the reform and development of China’s banks as the background,the market power hypothesis and the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis are used to support the theoretical basis of this thesis.The sample of the thesis selects the annual data of listed companies from 2013 to 2018.By constructing a multiple regression model,the influence of bank expansion on the human capital structure of firms is studied by the thesis.In addition,the mechanism of the effect from the perspective of the intermediary utility of financing constraints is also analyzed by the thesis.What’s more,the heterogeneity of the effect from the perspective of enterprise ownership,enterprise scale and financing constraints,and the type of commercial banks are discussed by the thesis.The research results show that:(1)The expansion of the number of commercial bank branches and the improvement of the degree of bank structural competition can alleviate the financing constraints,which means the market power hypothesis holds.(2)The expansion of the number of commercial bank branches and the improvement of the degree of bank structural competition can promote the upgrading of the human capital structure of enterprises,and financing constraints play an intermediary effect.In other words,bank expansion can improve the human capital structure of enterprises by alleviating the financing constraints.Therefore,the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis is verified.(3)The expansion of the number of commercial bank branches and the improvement of the degree of bank structural competition have heterogeneous effects on the human capital structure of enterprises.One of the specific manifestations is that the impact is more significant in private enterprises,small-scale enterprises,and enterprises facing strong financing constraints.Another manifestation is that the expansion of joint-stock commercial banks and city commercial banks a more obvious impact on the upgrading of the human capital structure of enterprises.The robustness of the regression results of this thesis is enhanced by replacing the measures of the human capital structure and excluding cities with a large number of universities.Finally,relevant policy recommendations from the perspectives of enterprises,banks and governments are put forward by this thesis based on the above research conclusions.