银行贷款、融资制约和中小企业投资外文翻译.doc

外文翻译 原文 Bank lending, financing constraints, SME investment Material Source: Proceedings Author: Santiago Carbo-Valverde The ability of firms to optimally exploit investment opportunities may crucially depend on the level of financial constraints that they face. SMEs may be particularly vulnerable because these firms are more opaque and thus susceptible to more credit rationing. Inquiry into the presence of financing constraints began in earnest with Fazzari et al. (1988) and their investigation of investment-cash flow sensitivity. However, this line of inquiry has been quite controversial. In particular, Kaplan and Zingales (1997 and 2000) have shown that correlation between investment and cash flow may not be a good indicator of financial constraints. In this paper we move this line of inquiry in a somewhat different direction. In some sense we look at the “dual” of the cash flow-investment sensitivity argument. Fazzari et al. (1988) argue that because financially constrained firms have limited access to external finance, their ability to exploit wealth-improving investment opportunities will be sensitive to their ability to finance these projects internally – that is, it will be sensitive to their cash flow. From an econometric perspective the cash flow variable may be problematic because, among other things, it may be correlated with omitted variables (e.g., Caballero and Leahy, 1996). To minimize these problems we take a more direct approach. Specifically, we instead focus on bank loans rather than cash flow in a sample of SMEs for whom bank loans are likely the least costly form of external finance. Our argument here is that just as the capital expenditures of less constrained firms are less likely to be sensitive to cash flow, they are more likely to be sensitive to bank loan funding. That is, unconstrained firms will utilize low cost bank loans to finance capital expenditures. In particular, we hypothesize that increased bank loan funding will (not