This paper investigates how government fiscal constraints transmit to the private sector through procurement. We exploit three rounds of VAT rate cuts in China (2017–2019) as exogenous shocks to local government revenues. Combining city-level fiscal pressure measures with 9,189 procurement contracts from A-share listed firms, we construct a firm-year exposure index weighted by procurement volumes across cities. We find that exposure to fiscally stressed government buyers significantly depresses firm valuation: a one-standard-deviation increase reduces Tobin's Q and price-to-sales ratios by 5.3% and 4.3%, respectively. This effect concentrates among private firms, those lacking industrial policy support, and firms with lower rent-seeking expenditures—precisely those with weaker bargaining power against government counterparties. Beyond valuation, such exposure leads to a subsequent deterioration in firm fundamentals, characterized by tightened liquidity constraints, reduced investment and financing, and worse information disclosure over a three-year horizon. Land finance partially buffers these effects. Our findings highlight an unintended micro-level consequence of macro fiscal policy: expansionary tax cuts designed to stimulate the private sector may inadvertently harm firms by weakening the government's capacity to fulfill procurement payments.

To better understand the government’s role in corporate social responsibility (CSR), we use the relocation of local governments in China as an exogenous shock to examine how geographic distance from the government affects corporate charitable donations. The Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis indicates that firms reduce charitable donations when local governments move closer. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises and for firms located in cities with lower fiscal pressure. The results remain consistent to a series of robustness tests, including alternative sample specifications, different measures of donations, and various estimation methods. We do not observe a corresponding increase in donations when governments move farther away. Additional analysis indicates that when the government relocates closer, firms may reallocate resources away from traditional charitable donations toward CSR activities that involve more active engagement.

We investigate the choice problem in the massive Chinese restructuring campaign that has been described as “grasping the large and letting go of the small,” in which a third of the million or so Chinese state-owned enterprises were either corporatized or privatized. Corporatization differs from privatization in the Chinese context, as in the former case the state remains a large shareholder, whereas in the latter case it has little or no ownership. Using a panel of provincial level statistics, we show that greater local employment pressure, less local fiscal pressure, and a more corrupt local business environment all lead to a lesser likelihood that privatization will be chosen over corporatization. Privatization is found to yield consistent efficiency gains over corporatization in terms of employment and firm profitability. Our evidence is supportive of the theoretical framework of Boycko, Shleifer, and Vishny (1996), who model privatization as an endogenous decision in which politicians trade off employment pressure against public fiscal interest.

We investigate the endogenous choice problem of Chinese state-owned enterprises in their decision on whether to corporatize or privatize. Corporatization differs from privatization in the Chinese context, as in the former case, the state remains as a large shareholder, and in the latter case, the state has little or no ownership. Using a panel of provincial statistics, we show that the larger the local employment pressure, the less likely we see privatization; the smaller the local fiscal pressure, the less likely we see privatization; the more corrupted the local business environment, the less likely we see privatization. Privatization is found to yield consistent efficiency gains over corporatization measured in terms of both employment and firm profitability. Our evidences are supportive of the theoretical framework of Boycko and Shleifer and Vishny (1996) where they model privatization as politicians’ endogenous decision trading off employment pressure against public fiscal interest.