Banks have a significant funding-cost advantage if their liabilities are protected by bailout guarantees. We construct a corporate finance-style model showing that banks can exploit this funding-cost advantage by just intermediating funds between investors and ultimate borrowers, thereby earning the spread between their reduced funding rate and the competitive market rate. This mechanism leads to a crowding-out of direct market finance and real effects for bank borrowers at the intensive margin: banks protected by bailout guarantees induce their borrowers to leverage excessively, to overinvest, and to conduct inferior high-risk projects. We confirm our model predictions using U.S. panel data, exploiting exogenous changes in banks' political connections, which cause variation in bailout expectations. At the bank level, we find that higher bailout probabilities are associated with more wholesale debt funding and lending. Controlling for loan demand, we confirm this effect on bank lending at the bank-firm level and find evidence on loan pricing consistent with a shift towards riskier borrower real investments. Finally, at the firm level, we find that firms linked to banks that experience an expansion in their bailout guarantees show an increase in their leverage, higher investment levels with indications of overinvestment, and lower productivity.

Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, preventing financial crises has become one of the most important objectives of regulators and banks. Although previous studies have identified the phenomenon of risk contagion in the banking system, the underlying mechanisms of risk contagion are still unclear. This study delves into the multi-stage contagion mechanism of liquidity risk based on interbank lending linkages and clearing rules and introduces a new index to quantify bank liquidity risk. We find that the contagion of liquidity risk is primarily determined by the network structure of risk exposures between banks in default and is not significantly influenced by the lending relationships of banks that remain solvent. The empirical results suggest that banks with high risk should be prioritized for cash injections to improve system liquidity. These findings offer new insights into financial risk contagion and practical recommendations for regulatory authorities formulating intervention strategies and for banks conducting risk management.

This paper provides evidence on the cost of political interference on banks with Chinese Private Enterprise Survey data between 2002 and 2012. Using regional political turnovers as a proxy for political influence, we show that political motivations for future promotions distort the bank lending decisions and crowd out lending to private firms. Besides, firms with business connections are more sensitive to turnover, while political connections are not significantly affected. These lending distortions are more considerable where competition for future promotion is more intense and where incumbents have more influence over banks. Moreover, the effect is especially pronounced for small firms. As a result of reduced bank credit, firms’ total credit availability decreases and they have to cut investments. Overall, our results suggest that preferential lending to politically important sectors has negative spillovers and can lead to costly crowding-out of private sectors.

We study how bank liberalization affects analyst forecast accuracy using two interest rate deregulations in China—the removal of the cap on bank lending rates in 2004 and the removal of the floor in 2013—as quasi-natural experiments. Our results show that the analyst forecast accuracy for high-risk firms decreases significantly after the removal of the lending rate cap, whereas analyst forecast accuracy for low-risk firms increases significantly after the removal of the lending rate floor. Moreover, interest rate liberalization affects forecast accuracy through operational risk and information asymmetry channels. Furthermore, the impact was concentrated on firms whose actual performance fell short of performance expectations and those that received more bank loans. Our findings imply that interest rate liberalization policies may have unintended consequences for analyst forecasts.

Utilizing the removal of the bank lending interest rate floor (IRFD) in China as an exogenous shock of banking liberalization, we find that IRFD leads to a significant rise in firms’ cost of equity capital, which is consistent with the prediction from the MM theory. The identified effects are more pronounced among firms with weaker ex-ante corporate governance and more severe ex-ante agency problems. We also find that IRFD witnesses an increase in the amount of acquired bank loans, a decrease in the average interest rate, and an increase in free cash flow. Further evidence also suggests IRFD provokes a drop in firms’ investment quality. Overall, our findings highlight an unexplored role of banking sector deregulation on firms’ cost of equity capital.

We study how shadow banking affects the effectiveness of monetary policy in China.Using novel data on bank-issued off-balance sheet wealth management products (WMPs), we show that banks improve their on-balance sheet risk profile by issuing WMPs. This in turn lowers the sensitivity of banks' wholesale funding cost to monetary policy and reduces the effectiveness of the bank lending channel. The effect of our mechanism on total credit is quantitatively similar to the effect arising from the substitution between traditional loans and shadow banking loans previously analyzed in the literature. The channel documented in this paper has novel implications for the regulation of banks' off-balance sheet activities and market-based funding.

In geographically segmented credit markets, local real estate booms can divert capital away from manufacturing firms, create capital scarcity, increase local real interest rates, lower real wages, and cause underinvestment and relative decline in the industrial sector. Using exogenous variation in the administrative land supply across 172 Chinese cities, we show that the predicted variation in real estate prices does indeed cause substantially higher capital costs for manufacturing firms, reduce their bank lending, lower their capital intensity and labor productivity, weaken firms' financial performance, and reduce their TFP growth by economically significant magnitudes. This evidence highlights macroeconomic stability concerns associated with real estate booms.

We investigate how monetary policy in a mixed financial system such as that of China, which is characterized by a juxtaposition of quantity- and price-based policy instruments and the co-existence of regulated and market-determined interest rates, affects bank lending. Using a newly constructed loan-level dataset, we find that loan rates but not loan size are affected by both the regulated and the market-determined interest rates and that loan size is instead affected by an implicit quota that is imposed on aggregate bank lending through window guidance. We interpret this finding to be evidence of credit rationing.

The existing literature on political capital and bank lending has largely overlooked the role of political environment. Based on the theories of political marketplace, all-pay auction and political instability, we examine the conditional effect of political capital on access to bank loans with political environment surrounding private firms changing, using a nationwide survey of private firms in 2010. In particularly, we characterize the political environment with political capital inequality and political instability. We find that private firms have more difficulty gaining access to bank lending with the increase in the degree of political capital inequality. Furthermore, political capital exerts a positive effect on access to bank loans only when political capital inequality within a province exceeds 0.4775 and political instability does not exceed 0.7.

This paper studies the determinants of cash holdings and the marginal value of cash in China’s share-issued privatized firms from 1994 – 2007. We first analyze the effects of firm characteristics on corporate cash holdings and find empirical evidence that is largely consistent with U.S. and other international evidence in previous studies. Specifically, we find that smaller, more profitable and high growth firms hold more cash. Debt and net working capital are negatively related to cash holdings, suggesting that debt and working capital may be treated as cash substitutes. We also find that state ownership is negatively related to cash holdings. Firms with high state ownership are less financially constrained in that they have better access to credit in the mostly state-owned bank lending environment. We further examine the cross-sectional variations in the marginal value of corporate cash holdings. We find that the marginal value of cash declines with higher level of cash and higher level of debt, consistent with evidence in U.S. firms. Our most important finding is that the marginal value of cash declines as the equity ownership retained by the state increases. For the average firm in our sample, the value of an additional dollar is $0.94. An additional dollar is valued $0.33-$0.47 higher in firms with zero percent state ownership than in firms with 50 percent or higher state ownership. This difference is both statistically and economically significant.