中國上市公司之間的資源錯配：國有企業(yè)的角色演變

1、IntroductionChina has experienced a sustained period of growth over the last three decades. During this time, Chinese authorities have pursued major reforms, including a transition away from state management of most sectors of the economy. Indeed, between 1998 and 2005 the share of state-owned enter

2、prises (SOEs) in industrial output fell from 50 to 30 percent. This transition coincided with rapid aggregate productivity growth, which came in part from the growth of the private sector at the expense of less productive SOEs ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Hsieh and Song, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2015; H

3、YPERLINK l _bookmark19 Brandt, Van Biesebroeck and Zhang, HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2012).However, productivity growth and progress on SOE reforms slowed in recent years. The slogan of “Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small” reflected the Chinese governments desire to maintain control of the largest an

4、d most profitable SOEs, many of which were publicly listed. Some of these SOEs became national champions, growing into indus- try leaders and now counting among the worlds largest firms ( HYPERLINK /en/Publications/FM/Issues/2020/04/06/fiscal-monitor-april-2020 IMF Fiscal Monitor, April HYPERLINK /e

5、n/Publications/FM/Issues/2020/04/06/fiscal-monitor-april-2020 2020). In China itself, large publicly listed SOEs account now for 35 percent of aggregate SOE revenues. Though a new wave of SOE reforms, particularly focused on larger firms, was announced at the Third Plenum in 2013, reform progress ap

6、pears to have been slow, with the government reluctant to reduce its role ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Rosen et al., HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2018). The question re- mains, therefore, whether there is scope for further reforms of the state-owned sector which could provide a boost to productivity growth.

7、 This is especially relevant given that aggregate productivity growth in China has slowed over the past decade, averag- ing a mere 0.6 percent between 2012 and 2017. Our paper contributes to this debate by measuring productivity gaps between listed SOEs and private firms from 2002 to 2019, and quant

8、ifying the potential gains from reforms.We use data on publicly listed Chinese firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock ex- changes between 2002 and 2019 to compare the productivity of SOEs relative to privately- owned firms. We define SOEs as firms where the major shareholder or ultimate con- troll

9、er is a central or local government agency. Private firms are those in which neither central nor local Chinese government entities have an ownership stake. A benefit of fo- cusing on listed firms is that data is available until 2019, while other surveys (such as the commonly used Annual Survey of In

10、dustries) is only available until 2013. In addition, listed firms cover all sectors of the economy, rather than just manufacturing. While our sample only covers 3,700 firms, they are a large and growing share of the Chinese econ- omy, accounting for 6 percent of GDP in 2019 and 10 percent of industr

11、ial value-added.Our baseline productivity measures are labor productivity, capital productivity and a total factor productivity (TFP) constructed as value-added divided by a geometric aver- age of capital and labor (measured as employment), corresponding to a standard Cobb-Douglas production functio

12、n. As we dont have firm-specific prices, our measure of firm-level TFP is a measure of revenue productivity , which we refer to as TFPR. TFPR reflects differences in revenues that cannot be explained by variations in inputs. Thus, differences in TFPR between firms can correspond to differences in fa

13、ctor prices (e.g. interest rates), markups, or other taxes and subsidies but they do not necessarily reflect differences in the technology of firms, their production efficiency or the quality of their products.Even among publicly listed firms, we document large and statistically significant dif- fer

14、ences in TFPR between SOEs and private firms. On average, SOEs have 30 percent lower TFPR than private firms in the same sector, with differences largely driven by a high number of low productivity SOEs: 15 percent of SOEs are in the bottom decile of the TFPR distribution while only 7 percent of pri

15、vate firms are. This TFPR gap increased between 2002 and 2009 with the listing of many new high-TFPR private firms. It has remained broadly stable until 2016, and closed slightly between 2016 and 2019. When differentiating between capital and labor productivity, we find that the SOE-private firm TFP

16、R gap is accounted for by a very large difference in capital productivity (over 50 per- cent), while on average labor productivity is only 6 percent lower.Our findings are robust to various measures of productivity, including using a gross output production function rather than a value-added product

17、ion function. We also find large and significant differences between SOEs and private firms over time in ac- counting measures of firm profitability, such as net profits over revenues and return on assets. Despite the differences in governance and incentives between central-government owned enterpri

18、ses and local-government owned enterprises ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Lin and Chang, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2019), we do not find any difference between them in terms of TFPR. This could stem from the fact that only the best local SOEs (i.e. those that operate as efficiently as central SOEs) can be

19、publicly listed.One potential explanation for the high capital-intensity and low capital productiv- ity of SOEs is that they have cheaper costs of financing than private firms. The existing literature provides ample evidence that state-owned enterprises enjoy preferential ac- cess to credit relative

20、 to private firms ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Poncet, Steingress and Vandebussche, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2010; HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Li, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Meng, Wang and Zhou, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2008; HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Boyreau-Debray and Wei, HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2005; HYPERLIN

21、K l _bookmark21 Wu, Firth and Rui, HYPERLINK l _bookmark21 2014; HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Bai, Lu and Tian, HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2018; HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Harrison, Meyer, Wang, Zhao and Zhao, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2019). Lower interest rates would incentivize SOEs to take on more debt and a

22、ccumulate more assets than private firms. We also explore this in our data by constructing the effective interest rates faced by listed firms in 2018 and 2019, measured as a ratio of interest expenses over total liabilities.1 We find that SOEs have higher leverage than private firms, and that their

23、ef-1These are the only years for which the interest expense variable is available.fective interest rates are lower than that for private firms, in particular when controlling for firm leverage. These differences are not small in magnitude. The effective interest rate is roughly a quarter smaller for

24、 SOEs compared to private firms, which could ex- plain half the capital productivity gap.To quantify the aggregate importance of the average firm-level productivity differ- ences, we interpret our findings through the lens of a model of heterogeneous firms following HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Hsieh and

25、 Klenow ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2009). The critical assumption is that the within-sector differences in measured SOE and private firm average products can be interpreted as differences in true marginal products which distort the optimal allocation of resources.2 Using sector-by-sector estimates of

26、 TFPR gaps, we evaluate the gains from closing the TFPR gap in each sector. To the extent that these differences are due to SOEs using a more capital-intensive technology than private firms, having larger overhead costs (as a share of their inputs) than private firms, or understating their revenues

27、(overstating their costs) more than private firms, our estimates provide an upper bound for the gains from closing TFPR gaps.We find average gains of 8.2 percent over our whole sample period, which decline to5.8 percent in 2019. We consider also a second counterfactual reform in which we close both

28、the TFPR gap and equalize the average capital intensity of SOEs and private firms, thus removing both scale distortions and factor distortions (following terminology from HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 David and Venkateswaran ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2019). In this case, we estimate larger average gains o

29、f 10.7 percent over our whole sample, and 7.5 percent as of 2019. Our findings suggest that there remain potentially large gains from SOE reform. In particular, reforms which would recognize and remove the implicit government guarantees that allow SOEs to access financing from banks and financial ma

30、rkets at lower rates could be particularly effective.Related LiteratureTo document the existence of large productivity gaps between SOEs and private firms, many firm-level studies have used the Chinese Annual Survey of Industries, which cov- ers all above-scale industrial firms up to 2013 ( HYPERLIN

31、K l _bookmark20 Hsieh and Klenow, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2009; HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Berkowitz et HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 al., HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2017; HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Bai et al., HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2018).3 Like us, most of this literature documents that capital pro- ductivity g

32、aps between SOEs and private firms were larger than labor productivity gaps.2We dont rely on the all TFPR dispersion to reflect dispersion in marginal products. A large part of thiscould simply be due to measurement error ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Bils et al., HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2020) or misspe

33、cification ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Haltiwanger et al., HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2018). 3Chinese Annual Survey of Industries includes all above scale state-owned firms as well as non-state firms. These are firms with sales exceeding 5 million RMB. In 2011, the designated size increased from 5million

34、 to 20 million RMB.Naturally, the listed firms in our sample account for a smaller share of GDP than above- scale industrial firms, though they still account for 35 percent of aggregate SOE revenues in 2019 and have broader sectoral coverage. Importantly, we have data through 2019, al- lowing us to

35、examine whether the major SOE reforms announced at the Third Plenum in 2013 had any effect. Our paper is one of the first to both document the existence of productivity gaps over this extended time period and provide a quantification of the resulting misallocation losses.Our paper also relates to an

36、 extensive literature examining the the role of resource reallocation between SOEs and private firms in Chinas recent economic transforma- tion. The contribution of privatization and exit of SOEs to aggregate productivity growth remains a point of discussion. HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Brandt et al. (

37、HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2012) find that within-firm productivity growth was an important source of growth from 1998 to 2007, though net entry con- tributed two thirds of TFP growth. Using a different decomposition, HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Hsieh and Song ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2015) find that the

38、privatization of SOEs and new entry of SOEs contributed 30 percent to aggregate productivity growth during the 2000s, with productivity growth among pri- vate firms explaining most of the rest. Given that listed firms accounted for a small share of GDP during the early 2000s, we dont assess their co

39、ntribution to aggregate produc- tivity growth over this period, but rather we consider how the losses due to resource misallocation among listed firms changed over time.A more recent literature has evaluated the gains from SOE privatization between 1998 and 2013. HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Harrison et

40、al. ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2019) and HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Chen et al. ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2020) both find that privatizing SOEs saw productivity improvements relative to SOEs that didnt privatize, though there remains a revenue productivity gap between ex-SOEs and private firms, with ex-

41、SOES still benefiting from implicit subsidies and cheaper access to credit. Given the focus of ”Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small” policies was to keep large SOEs within gov- ernment control, we dont see frequent privatization of SOEs among listed firms. We, therefore, focus on cross-sectional di

42、fferences in revenue productivity between SOEs and private firms. For the smaller sample of firms that did switch ownership, however, we do indeed find evidence of revenue productivity gains.Our paper also relates to an extensive literature on resource misallocation in China.4 HYPERLINK l _bookmark1

43、9 David and Venkateswaran ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2019) decompose capital productivity dispersion among large- scale industrial firms in China, finding that permanent differences in capital productiv- ity across firms account for most of it. HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Song and Wu ( HYPERLINK l _bookm

44、ark20 2015) conduct a similar exercise, also allowing for production functions to vary across firms, and still find substantial ag- gregate productivity losses due to misallocation. HYPERLINK l _bookmark21 Wu ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark21 2018) and HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Bai et al. ( HYPERLINK l _bookm

45、ark19 2018) both4The approach used in this literature began with HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Restuccia and Rogerson ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2008) and HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Hsieh and Klenow( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2009). See HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 Hopenhayn ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2014) for a rev

46、iew of the literature.find an important role for financial frictions in generating capital misallocation. Such financial frictions are less likely to explain our findings, however, given that we focus on large listed firms for which these tend to be less binding. Finally, HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Bra

47、ndt et al. ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2013) take a more sectoral approach, quantifying cross-sector and cross-region misallocation due to SOEs. Such cross-sector misallocation would imply larger potential gains from SOE reform than what we find in this paper.Our paper also relates to the literature e

48、xamining differences between the behavior of SOEs and private listed firms in China. HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Boeing et al. ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2016) document that listed firms benefit more from RD than SOEs, suggesting the potential for TFP losses due to misallo- cation in innovation inputs. H

49、YPERLINK l _bookmark19 Chen et al. ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2017) document that the within-business group allocation of capital is better for private firms than SOEs, and document that chairmen at SOEs tend to reallocate capital to prop up units within the same business group that operate in high u

50、nemployment areas. Such misaligned incentives could be an impor- tant explanation of our findings of persistently lower capital productivity for SOEs.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section HYPERLINK l _bookmark0 2. we discuss the dataset of listed firms in China and present some s

51、tylized facts. In Section HYPERLINK l _bookmark1 3. we estimate differ- ences in productivity between state owned and private firms. In Section HYPERLINK l _bookmark12 4. we present our model of misallocation, and in Section HYPERLINK l _bookmark15 5. we estimate the gains from reforms.Listed Firms

52、in ChinaWind Database of Listed FirmsWe use data on listed firms in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges between 2002 and 2019 from the Wind database.5 The main firm-level variables we use are em- ployment, operating costs, fixed assets and total revenues. We aggregate all quarterly variables t

53、o an annual frequency. We construct a measure of intermediate inputs as total operating costs minus labor costs, and construct firm-level value-added as total revenues minus intermediate inputs.6 We use the available industry classification of 28 industries (see Data Appendix). HYPERLINK l _bookmark

54、20 Hsieh and Song ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark20 2015) discuss the difficulties in measuring whether a firm is con- trolled by the Chinese state. Many large firms are officially registered as private when they are de facto state-owned, with the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Adminis- tration Commissi

55、on (SASAC) having controlling ownership shares. We therefore follow5Information available at HYPERLINK /en/data.html /en/data.html.6We impute labor costs using firm-level employment and average urban wages from the NBS. This approach follows closely how intermediate inputs and value-added are constr

56、ucted in HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 David and HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Venkateswaran ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2019). See Data Appendix for more details.our databases classification of firms as state-owned or not state-owned, which uses lo- cal and central government ownership and control rather firm re

57、gistration. We define SOEs as firms where the major shareholder belongs to a central or local government SASAC, a central or local state agency, or another central or local state-owned enter- prise. We also use this classification to separately define local SOEs and central SOEs. We define privately

58、 owned enterprises as firms in which neither central nor local Chi- nese government entities have an ownership stake. All other firm types are classified as Other.7While our database is smaller and less nationally representative than the commonly used Annual Industrial Survey, there are a few advant

59、ages to focusing on listed firms. Firstly, our data is available annually between 2002 and 2019, while the industrial survey is only available (with gaps) until 2013. Secondly, HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 Chen, Chen, Hsieh and Song ( HYPERLINK l _bookmark19 2019) find evidence of deteriorating data qual

60、ity in the Annual Industrial Survey from 2008 on. Listed firms have a stricter accounting framework to follow which are subject to more rigorous auditing. Finally, our data includes firms in all sectors of the economy, rather than just focusing on industrial firms.Stylized Facts about Listed FirmsAf