| After the economic crisis in 2008 and the "four trillion" economic stimulus plan,the leverage ratio of China’s real economy keeps rising.In order to cope with the increasing risk of debt accumulation and achieve high-quality economic growth,the Central Economic Work Conference put forward the task of compulsory "deleveraging" for the first time in December 2015,and took "the five priority tasks of cutting overcapacity,reducing excess inventory,deleveraging,lowering costs,and strengthening areas of weakness" as the starting of "supply-side structural reform".After that,the central government issued a series of policies to actively promote the deleveraging of nonfinancial enterprises.In 2016,the first deleveraging document was officially issued--Opinions of the State Council on Vigorously,Steadily and Properly Reducing Corporate Leverage Ratios,which emphasized for the first time that the basic principles of deleveraging are market-oriented,law-based,orderly and coordinated.It is advocated that enterprises should be encouraged to reduce corporate leverage ratio vigorously,steadily and properly by advancing merger,restructuring and improving the modern enterprise system.The Financial and Economic Commission of the CPC Central Committee put forward "structural deleveraging" in 2018,laying out the basic ideas for "preventing and defusing financial risks".In order to achieve differentiated and focused deleveraging,The State Council issued The General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council Issuing the Guiding Opinions on Strengthening Asset-Liability Constraints on State-owned Enterprises in 2018,and set up the early warning line and the key supervision line respectively for the supervision of the leverage ratio of SOEs.The State Council issued Major Tasks on Reducing Leverage Ratios of Enterprises in 2018 and Major Tasks on Reducing Leverage Ratios of Enterprises in 2019 for two consecutive years,providing guidance for regulatory authorities and enterprises in deleveraging work."Deleveraging" policy in China is the government,focusing on the accounting information such as leverage ratio,interest-bearing debt ratio,through a series of restriction and incentive mechanism,intervenes and controls the enterprise financing structure behavior,finally realizes the optimization of the corporate leverage and the promotion of resource allocation efficiency,promoting high-quality development of the real economy.Based on market failure theory,public interest theory and other theoretical perspectives,government regulation is necessary and important.However,regulation has costs(Stigler,1971;Cheung,1974;Li Yu-fang,2002;Wang Junhao,2004;Liu Xiaobing,2004).Scholars have studied the negative consequences of government regulation such as capital market IPO regulation,compensation regulation,audit market regulation and administrative approval regulation in the context of China(Chen Donghua et al.,2009;Yu Li Sheng and Wang Yanyan,2010;Zhang Feng et al.,2016;Hu Conghui and Qi Yunfei,2021).From the perspective of regulatory costs,does the "deleveraging" policy have negative effects? Empirical evidence on this issue is lacking.Based on the background of deleveraging policy and relevant research literature,this paper discusses the influence of deleveraging policy on dynamic adjustment of enterprise capital structure,enterprise investment and enterprise value.Specifically,this paper mainly answers the following three questions: First,based on the tradeoff theory,how will deleveraging policy affect the dynamic adjustment of capital structure of over-indebted and under-indebted enterprises? What are the incentives and capabilities of different firms to recapitalize? Secondly,does the deleveraging policy affect and how it affects the corporate value of under-indebted companies? What is the mechanism? Thirdly,has the deleveraging policy intensified the degree of " hidden leverage" of over-indebted enterprises?What impact will such "book deleveraging" have on corporate investment and corporate value?In order to answer these questions,based on regulation theory and tradeoff theory,this paper takes a-share non-financial listed companies from 2012 to 2020 as research samples and finds that:First,under the background of compulsory deleveraging policy,the capital structure adjustment speed of over-indebted enterprises is increased,while that of under-indebted enterprises is decreased.At the same time,the motivation and ability of listed companies to adjust the capital structure will significantly affect the implementation effect of deleveraging policy.And deleveraging policy has heterogeneous impact on the speed of capital structure adjustment of enterprises of different ownership.In the sample of over-indebted enterprises,compared with stateowned enterprises,non-state-owned enterprises have stronger motivation to adjust their capital structure,and their adjustment speed is faster.In the sample of under-indebted enterprises,compared with state-owned enterprises,non-state-owned enterprises have relatively weak ability to adjust capital structure,and thus adjust more slowly.In addition,the political connection of nonstate-owned enterprises can play a role in corporate financing.For under-indebted non-state-owned enterprises,political connection can help reduce the transaction cost of capital structure adjustment of under-indebted enterprises,and alleviate the inhibition of deleveraging policy on capital structure adjustment.Secondly,this paper studies the influence of deleveraging policy on under-indebted listed companies from the perspective of corporate investment and corporate value,and further reveals the regulatory costs of deleveraging policy.In chapter 5,through the design of DID,it is found that for under-indebted enterprises,the deleveraging policy implemented since 2015 not only slows down the adjustment speed of optimized capital structure,but also has a significant inhibitory effect on enterprise value.Further research shows that deleveraging policy aggravates the underinvestment,and leads to the reduction of innovation investment,which ultimately damages the enterprise value.In view of the phased characteristics of deleveraging policies,the paper finds that compared with the "one-size-fits-all" deleveraging policies,differentiated deleveraging policies after 2018 can improve the value of under-indebted enterprises,which verifies the importance of structural and differentiated deleveraging policy.Thirdly,this paper finds that over-indebted enterprises with higher degree of over-debt and weaker debt paying ability are more likely to "hidden leverage".Further analysis shows that "hidden leverage" will aggravate the over-investment,improve the degree of inefficient investment,and ultimately damage the enterprise value.In addition,stock market investors can recognize the negative signal of " hidden leverage" and react negatively.The conclusion of chapter 6 shows that issuing perpetual bonds is a strategic behavior of high leveraged enterprises with weak debt paying ability under the pressure of deleveraging policy.Although the accounting information presented by enterprises meets the requirements of deleveraging policy,it does not deleverage in essence,which is not conducive to the realization of the policy goal of preventing risks,nor to the highquality and sustainable development of enterprises.The research of this paper has academic contribution and practical value.The theoretical significance of this paper lies in:First,this paper expands the boundary of research on the economic consequences of deleveraging policy from the perspective of regulatory costs.This paper reveals the negative effects of "one size fits all" and the positive effects of "structural" deleveraging in the process of policy formulation and implementation.It enriched the research on the influence of deleveraging policy on dynamic adjustment of enterprise capital structure,enterprise investment and enterprise value,and provided some empirical reference for precise deleveraging.Secondly,the existing literature on government behavior and enterprise capital structure mainly focuses on the impact of industrial policy and monetary policy,but the research on dynamic adjustment of enterprise capital structure based on government regulation is limited.The research of this paper helps to enrich the cognition of trade off theory and regulation theory,and further deepen the understanding of dynamic adjustment ability and motivation.Finally,this paper provides empirical evidence for the effect of deleveraging policy on accounting information production,financial instrument innovation and enterprise value,which is an empirical test and further expansion of existing regulatory theories.The practical value of this paper is reflected in the following aspects:On the one hand,the governmant needs to make policies more refined and implement differentiated and focused deleveraging policy.We should adhere to the market-oriented and legalized means of deleveraging and implement policies by categories.For enterprises with moderate debt or low debt and low risk,we also need to stabilize leverage or increase leverage.We should not only consider the absolute level of the enterprise’s leverage,but also set the policy target of "target capital structure" based on many factors such as solvency,financial risk and profitability,accurately identify over-indebted or under-indebted enterprises,promote the highquality development of enterprises,and prevent the deleveraging policy from damaging the real enterprises value.On the other hand,we should improve the relevant accounting standards and attach importance to the production process of accounting information.We should not only pay attention to the change of enterprise asset-liability ratio or interest-bearing liability ratio,but also focus on the economic essence of enterprise accounting indicators,avoid the deviation caused by accounting information discretion,and truly realize the reduction of debt risk. |
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