Digital finance and misallocation of resources among firms: Evidence from China

Laiqun Jin, Jiaying Dai, Weijie Jiang and Kairui Cao

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2023, vol. 66, issue C

Abstract: The resources misallocation among firms is serious in China, our calculation shows it has resulted in the total factor productivity (hereafter, TFP) loss of over 200% and has been gradually increasing in recent years, based on the firm-level data from National Tax Survey database from 2007 to 2016. This paper further investigates empirically the impact of digital finance on resources misallocation, by measuring resources misallocation with firm’s capital deviation and labor deviation, as well as measuring digital finance with the number of searches for fintech keywords on Baidu's webpage. Results suggest that digital finance can significantly mitigate resources misallocation among firms to improve the aggregate TFP by redistributing resources from over-resourced firms to under-resourced firms, although it cannot improve the TFP within a representative firm. The findings remain robust after addressing the endogeneity and using alterative variables of digital finance and value of labor output elasticity. Moreover, digital finance can rectify the credit-market discrimination, where its mitigating effect on resources misallocation prefers to non-state-owned firms and small and medium-sized firms. However, traditional finance, as measured by the number of offline bank branches, can also optimize resources allocation, but this effect is gradually diminishing and it also fails to rectify the credit discrimination.

Keywords: Digital finance; Resources misallocation; Scale and ownership discrimination; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E44 O11 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940823000347
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:66:y:2023:i:c:s1062940823000347

DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2023.101911

Access Statistics for this article

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Hamid Beladi

More articles in The North American Journal of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().