Seminar（Dept. of Trade Economics）

Title: Young Firms' Financing Choices, Investment, and Growth

Speaker: Guoxuan Ma (Assistant professor, University of International Business and Economics)

Time: 10:00-11:30am, December 20, 2022 (Tuesday)

Venue: Online Meeting

Language：Chinese/English

Abstract：

This paper investigates the impact of access to different financing sources on young firms' future growth trajectories. Studying this causal effect involves selection issues and the reduced form analysis is hard to deal with the firm’s dynamics behavior problem. To address these issues, I use the Kauffman Firm Survey data to construct a firm life-cycle model with financing constraints. In this model, different types of firms can simultaneously choose up to three debt financing sources: business bank loans, personal bank loans, and credit card borrowing. By altering the accessibility of different funding sources through the structural model, I find credit card borrowing is essential for young firms’ early period financing support. Without credit card borrowing, most firms get out of debt within 4 years and average assets accumulation can drop by 15%. I also investigate how firms react to a general increase in the financing cost caused by the consolidation trend of the local bank industry. Higher concentration increases costs on all funding sources, but by different levels. Besides the reduction of firm borrowing, higher concentration has a negative impact on firms’ long-run growth potential. But the impact is not monotone.

Short biography：

Guoxuan graduated from the Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. in 2022. He joined Research Institute for Global Value Chains of University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), China on Sep. 2022. His research interest lies in the intersection between industrial organization and empirical macroeconomics, typically firm dynamics. His current work focuses on applying techniques from industrial organization to address frictions and information asymmetry in agents’ behavior.