Accounts Receivable Billization, Financing Constraints And Corporate Financializatio

At present,China’s economy is in a critical stage of supply-side structural reform and the transition from high-speed growth to high-quality development.The problem of payment arrears among enterprise departments has begun to intensify,which poses a potential threat to the long-term stable development of China’s real economy.By the end of 2019,the scale of accounts receivable of industrial enterprises above designated size has reached nearly 15 trillion yuan,accounting for more than a quarter of the company’s current assets and nearly 20%of its operating revenue.This greatly increases the management cost and bad debt risk of enterprises,and may cause financial strain and affect daily production and operation activities.For the purpose of operation and financing,enterprises sell credit,and the payment for goods that are not received immediately after the sale forms the creditor’s rights assets receivable,namely accounts receivable and notes receivable.Compared with the natural defects of accounts receivable,such as difficult to confirm rights and unstable repayment term,the payment days is fixed,highly liquid and conducive to the protection of creditor’s rights.In addition,the financing properties of commercial paper is also stronger.Discount and pledge of commercial paper is the most important external financing methods for many enterprises besides loans.In recent years,the commercial paper market has developed rapidly.The commercial paper market,with a stock of 10 trillion and an annual transaction volume of 100 trillion,has become an important part of China’s financial market.With the establishment of Shanghai Commercial Paper Exchange Corporation(SCPEC),the commercial paper market has become more mature,standardized and efficient due to the improvement of financial infrastructure.At present,the two development directions of the commercial paper market to better serve the real economy are to popularize the commercial paper and encourage financial institutions to rely on commercial paper to provide financing services for the upstream and downstream enterprises of the industrial chain.In this context,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to systematically study the commercial paper and its impact on the real economy.This paper analyzes the connotation of commercial paper popularization and constructs the agent index from the perspective of payment behavior.At present,there is no final conclusion on the definition of commercial paper popularization,and there are two main viewpoints.One is that from the perspective of clearing up receivables,commercial paper popularization refers to guiding enterprises to issue commercial paper to replace receivables,that is,reflecting the proportion of longterm arrears to be cleared through commercial paper.The other is based on the payment behavior of enterprises,emphasizing the motivation of core enterprises to issue commercial paper,so that suppliers can receive more at the same scale of credit sales,that is,the proportion of credit sales transactions between enterprises to be paid through commercial paper at present or during a certain period.Clearing up the existing arrears is only a temporary improvement.If it falls into the vicious circle of clearing and debt,then clearing and debt again,it not only fails to solve the problem but also makes the enterprise bear the cost of issuing invoices.This paper holds that the commercial paper popularization is more a reflection of the frequency and habit of enterprises using commercial paper in credit sales and payment.Therefore,the proportion of commercial paper in the total amount of accounts receivable is used to construct an index to measure the degree of enterprise’s commercial paper popularization.After the commercial paper is paid and financed through endorsement,discount and other operations,the amount will not be listed and shown in the balance sheet of the enterprise.Therefore,this paper downloads the annual reports of listed companies over the years,collects and sorts out relevant forms to summarize the total amount of commercial paer that have not yet been terminated and recognized,and adds this amount to receivables,in order to measure commercial paper popularization more accurately from the perspective of payment behavior.At the same time,using the micro data at the enterprise level,this paper constructs the overall commercial paper popularization indicators at the industry and city levels.The borrowing relationship between enterprises due to deferred payment is called commercial credit.The commercial paper is a standard commercial credit model,and the degree of commercial paper popularization at the level of industry and city is a good proxy indicator to measure the external commercial credit environment of enterprises.This paper takes Chinese listed companies as samples and aims to answer the following questions through theoretical analysis and empirical research.First,the receivables receivable degree of enterprises shows obvious industry characteristics,and the heterogeneity between enterprises is large,what important factors will have an impact on it?Second,notes are superior in every way to accounts receivable as a financing instrument,but receipt of them still implies a delay in payment,and the additional cost of issuing notes may be passed on to the corporate sector.Therefore,can the promotion of commercial paper popularization and the improvement of commercial credit environment ease the financing constraints faced by enterprises?Third,in recent years,enterprises have shown a trend of financial development.It means that the quality of creditor’s rights receivable assets of enterprises has been improved.Does it inhibit or aggravate the financialization degree of enterprises?The establishment of the SCPEC makes the commercial paper market in China more standardized and unified,and the commercial paper financing efficiency is higher and the cost is lower.Will it promote the promotion of the commercial paper and commercial paper market to serve the entity enterprises?In order to answer the above questions,this paper is mainly divided into the following three parts for empirical research:First of all,this paper studies the influencing factors of commercial paper popularization.Core enterprises have a strong control and influence in the supply chain.This paper finds that core enterprises also play an important role in the commercial paper market through theoretical and empirical analysis.Core enterprises have a strong demonstration and driving force.When these enterprises sell on credit,the more commercial paper they receive,the proportion of other enterprises in their industry will also rise,and it is an important explanatory variable of the degree of commercial paper popularization of these non-core enterprises.The establishment of SCPEC reduces the transaction cost of the commercial paper market and improves the circulation efficiency,which intensifies the spillover effect of the core enterprises on the same industry enterprises in the commercial paper market.At the micro enterprise level,social responsibility and customer concentration also have an impact on the commercial paper popularization degree.The high quality of the enterprise’s social responsibility delivers the signal of its strong ability,high quality and trustworthiness.Customers are often willing to establish a stable supply chain relationship with such enterprises and bear a small amount of extra cost to issue commercial paper for payment and settlement in order to achieve higher quality.The customer concentration degree of an enterprise reflects the relative bargaining power and information symmetry in trade between the two sides.The supplier enterprise with low concentration degree has higher bargaining power,less willingness to understand the other company,and more willingness and ability to require the other company to complete the payment with commercial paper.Secondly,this paper finds that commercial paper popularization helps to ease the financing constraints of enterprises.Although the cost of issuing commercial paper may be partially transferred to the receivers.Commercial paper,as a standard commercial credit model,provide better creditor protection,more financing channels and stronger bargaining power.The empirical results show that under the same scale of credit sales,the more commercial paper an enterprise receives or the more standardized external commercial credit environment is,the more financing constraints will be alleviated.The establishment of SCPEC has a positive impact on the commercial paper market,which reduces the commercial paper financing cost,improves the efficiency,lowers the overall debt cost of enterprises,and further enhances the ability of the commercial paper to alleviate financing constraints.Further,this paper finds that the easing of financing constraints by commercial paper is more significant in enterprises with high degree of information asymmetry and low proportion of fixed assets,indicating that commercial paper,as a financing tool,can alleviate financing constraints mainly by reducing the degree of information asymmetry between enterprises and the outside world and improving the quality of creditor’s rights assets.Finally,this paper finds that commercial paper popularization can restrain the trend of enterprise financialization.Commercial paper popularization not only improves the business environment of the enterprise sector,reduces the uncertainty of collection,and enables enterprises to hold a buffer tool with higher liquidity.Financial assets and the debt financing as a tool for enterprise investment activities buffer,there are certain substitution effect between the two,the paper by inhibiting the enterprises "reservoir" motivation,implementation,the restraint of the financialization that line up with the size of the case,the company received the more notes or external commercial credit environment,the specification,the lower the holdings of financial assets.After the establishment of SCPEC,the commercial paper market has become more efficient and liquidity has further improved,and this inhibiting effect has become stronger.At the same time,the composition of received commercial paper will also affect the inhibitory effect on financial assets.The bank acceptance is more liquid and the financing cost is lower,so under the same circumstances,the degree of financialization of the enterprises that receive the bank acceptance is also lower.Existing studies on commercial credit are relatively mature,but they seldom analyze the differences in the structure of commercial credit,and focus more on payers,and lack of attention to suppliers.As for the commercial paper popularization and the connection between the commercial paper financing and the real economy,it is still in the initial stage due to the limitation of data,and it makes more inferential comments from the logic and mechanism.In this paper,the microdata of the company level,from the perspective of commercial paper popularization,to explore the important factors affecting the development of commercial paper popularization,to provide reference for the promotion of commercial paper popularization;At the same time,from the two perspectives of financing constraints and financialization,the paper discusses the connection between commercial paper popularization and the real economy,providing empirical evidence for the commercial paper market to better serve the real economy,and providing new solutions to problems such as difficult financing,expensive financing and slow financing for enterprises,and financialization of real enterprises.