FinTech Empowerment and Real Economy Repair:Based on the Covid-19 Shock
High-quality development is the primary task to comprehen-sively building a modern socialist country.However,the world is in a situation of great change unprecedented in hundreds years,uncertain and unpredictable factors in China's development are increasing,which has had a significant impact on the realisation of high-quality develop-ment.After the outbreak of COVID-19,China's economic development is further faced with the"triple pressure"of demand contraction,supply shock,and weakened expectations,the macro-economy is under tre-mendous downward pressure.In order to stabilise the economy,China Central Economic Work Conference in 2021 and 2022 both proposed"actively expanding investment",which as a major component affecting China's economic fluctuations.Investment plays a key role in imple-menting counter-cyclical regulation and are important for stabilising the macro-economy.Theoretically,the total social investment is the sum of many micro real enterprise investment,so to explore how to enhance the real enterprise investment under the current unfavourable impact is of great theoretical and practical significance.However,credit market frictions arising from information asymmetry and agency problems in lending and borrowing relationships limit real enterprise investment,and information asymmetry and agency problems further deteriorate under crisis shocks,reducing the speed of macroeco-nomic recovery from the crisis and limiting real enterprise investment.As a new stage in the development of the financial sector,theoretically,FinTech can alleviate the financing constraints of real enterprises by weakening the information asymmetry in lending and borrowing rela-tionships,reducing the role of collateral asset.Whether FinTech promotes investment in real enterprises under the crisis and what is the underlying mechanism,will be the main focus of the research issues in this paper.The main research of this paper includes four aspects:benchmark re-gression results,robustness checks,mechanism analysis,and additional analysis.Specifically,this article takes A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2021 as the research object,constructing quarterly panel data,and takes the COVID-19 as the representative crisis shock,and the first quarter of 2020 as the time point of epidemic crisis.The study finds that FinTech significantly enhances real firms'investment after the crisis,and this re-sult still holds after endogeneity test,replacing the explained variable,and other robustness tests.The mechanism test shows that FinTech enhances the external financing ability of real firms during crisis shocks by reducing collateral constraints and mitigating information asymmetry,and improves the efficiency of capital allocation.The heterogeneity test found that:the impact of FinTech on investment under crisis shocks is more significant among firms with shorter years and in regions where the traditional bank-ing sector is less developed.The economic consequence test show that:FinTech significantly enhances the resilience of real firms,increases the leverage of real firms under crisis shocks but no positive effect on account-ing performance,which corresponds to the mechanism that enhances the ability to raise external financing.At the macro level,fintech significantly reduces macroeconomic volatility under crisis shocks.The research contribution of the article is mainly in the following aspects:Firstly,the existing literature on FinTech mainly argues that FinTech has changed the traditional lending market and explores the role of FinTech from various aspects.However,it neglects the fact that as a major change in the financial industry,FinTech plays a crucial role in times of crisis.Based on the external unfavourable shock of the Covid-19,this paper ex-plores the impact of FinTech on investment of real enterprises under the crisis shock from the perspective of investment of real enterprises,which is an important behaviour that affects the stability and development of the economy,and discusses the specific role mechanism of FinTech to al-leviate the financing constraints from three perspectives of the collateral channel,the information channel,and the efficiency of the credit resource allocation.It expands and deepens our knowledge of the operating law of the real economy affected by FinTech,and provides theoretical basis for the government to introduce macro policies to accurately regulate the real economy in the era of FinTech.Secondly,many scholars have tried to explore how to promote economic stability from multiple perspective.As an important part of GDP,real enterprise investment is a necessary part to achieving economic stability and promoting economic development under the crisis impact,but the discussion on how to promote real enterprise investment under the crisis impact is still insufficient.As a higher stage of financial development,FinTech has had a profound impact on the development of traditional fi-nancial industry.Based on the Covid-19 impact,this paper discusses the impact of FinTech on the investment of real enterprises under the impact of the crisis,which not only broadens the research related to the invest-ment of real enterprises under the impact of the crisis,but also provides certain thinking and reference on how to promote the economic stability with the help of FinTech under the new situation.Thirdly,this paper provides new evidence for the ability of FinTech to enhance financial services in the real economy,and provides theoreti-cal support for how to further regulate and guide the development of FinTech.How to effectively improve the ability of financial services in the real economy has always been the core objective of the supply-side structural reform of China's financial industry,as an important hand of financial empowerment of the development of the real economy,whether FinTech can enhance the ability of financial services in the real economy has not yet authoritative evidence,this paper confirms the ability of Fin-Tech to serve the real economy by taking investment in real enterprises under the impact of the crisis as an entry point,to provide new evidence of how to regulate and guide the development of FinTech in the future.This paper takes the investment of real enterprises under the impact of the crisis as an entry point to confirm the ability of FinTech to serve the real economy,provides new evidence for the ability of FinTech to em-power financial services to the real economy,and provides theoretical support for how to regulate and guide FinTech development policies in the future.
the Covid-19FinTechEconomic RecoveryReal Enterprise Investment
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