Investment and Investment Opportunities: Do Constrained Firms Cherish Investment Opportunity More in China?

Transcription

1 Investment and Investment Opportunities: Do Constrained Firms Cherish Investment Opportunity More in China? Sai Ding Marina Spaliara John Tsoukalas Xiao Zhang May 2015 Abstract The aim of this paper is to assess firms response to investment opportunities when they face different levels of financial constraints. To better measure the investment opportunity, we attempt to improve Q model by considering supply and demand simultaneously. To test our theoretical predictions, we use a panel of over 600,000 firms of different ownership types from 1998 to 2007 to find the link between investment opportunities and financial constraints. The main finding indicates that private firms, which are more likely to be financially constrained, have high investment-investment opportunity sensitivity compared to state owned firms in China. This shows that constrained firms are more likely to take advantage of the investment opportunities more than their unconstrained counterparts. Finally, when we take into account demand and supply shocks that might affect q, we find that various types of firms respond differently towards different opportunity shocks. JEL Classification: D21 D92,E22,G31 Preliminary draft please do not quote University of Glasgow, Business School/Department of Economics, Main Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ. sai.ding@glasgow.ac.uk University of Glasgow, Business School/Department of Economics, Main Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ. marina.spaliara@glasgow.ac.uk University of Glasgow, Business School/Department of Economics, Main Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ. john.tsoukalas@glasgow.ac.uk University of Glasgow, Business School/Department of Economics, Adam Smith Building, Glasgow G12 8RT. x.zhang.3@research.gla.ac.uk 1

2 1 Introduction Financing constraints are considered to play an important role in the investment behaviour of firms. Yet, this might not be the case for Chinese firms. One possible reason could be the mismeasurement of q. Marginal q and cash flow are used as proxies for fundamentals and financial factors, respectively. However, cash flow may contain information of investment opportunities. If fundamentals cannot be measured properly, the effect of financial factors could be overstated (see Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1999)). Bond et al. (2004) show that cash flow may provide additional information when average Q variable is poorly captured. Recent empirical Chinese studies show that private firms, which are more likely to be constrained, invest more and grow faster than unconstrained firms. 1 If financial constraints have no significant effect on investment decisions, it is hard to interpret the investment-cash flow sensitivity even though we find a monotonic relationship. In this study we aim two answer the following two questions. First, how do firms in China respond to investment opportunities and second, whether private firms are more likely to face financial constraints but at the same time invest more and grow faster than state owned enterprises (SOEs). To answer our questions we attempt to unfold the relationship between investment and investment opportunities.theoretically, we provide a more comprehensive and precise measurement of investment opportunities. q is subject to both demand shocks and supply shocks and therefore it is of great importance to take into account both supply and demand. Empirically, we proxy for the supply shocks by using the growth of total factor productivity (TFP hereafter) and for the demand shocks by using sales growth. Further, we forecast q with panel VAR to take forward looking investment opportunities into consideration. In order to take a deep look at how different investment opportunities affect firm-level investment and how different types of firms response to investment opportunities, we apply impulse response function and system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimation. Using data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China for more than 600,000 firms from 1998 to 2007 we find that private firms show greater sensitivity to investment opportunities than SOEs. This result holds for all three proxies of investment opportunities. Private firms are more likely to take advantage of investment opportunities. This result provides an explanation to the fast growth of private firms compared to SOEs. In addition, we find that firms 1 According to (Allen et al., 2005) the growth of Chinese economy is strongly related to the growth of private firms. 2

3 in China show different response to different opportunity shocks. For example, foreign firms show high sensitivity to the demand growth but relatively low sensitivity to the supply growth. Also, we find a weaker impact of cash flow on the investment-tfp growth sensitivity but a stronger impact of cash flow on the investment sales growth sensitivity. This suggests that cash flow contains more information on demand shocks than supply shocks and emphasizes the importance of the decomposition of investment opportunities between demand and supply. The rest of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review of firm-level investment in China and studies on marginal q. Section 3 describes how we decompose q model and how we combine supply and demand side together. Section 4 discusses our baseline specification and empirical methodology. Section 5 introduces the data we use and presents summary statistics. Section 6 reports main empirical results and finally section 7 concludes. 2 Literature Review 2.1 Financial constraints and investment There are several very influential empirical studies on investment and debates on Q theory shed light on our research. To answer the question why constrained firms grow faster, we firstly discuss about how constrained firms finance themselves. Since FHP (1988), a number of papers show that financial constrained firms have high investmentcash flow sensitivity. They rely cash flow to finance their investment.besides, many influential papers suggest that constrained firms will use their savings to investment. Almeida et al. (2004) find that constrained firms have incentive to accumulate cash. This result is consistent with the finding of Cooper and Haltiwanger (2006). Riddick and Whited (2009) said the unusually high levels of cash accumulation questions of previous studies. Saving policy depends not only on the cost of external finance, but also on forms expected future financing needs. In then context of China, Allen et al. (2005) study this topic from the perspective of financial markets. They use the data set from China Security Regulation Committee to show that the financial system is underdeveloped in China. They state that stock markets in China are smaller than most of developed countries and China s banking system is much more important in terms of size. Its ratio of total bank credit to GDP is 1.11 which is higher than German. However, when study private firms only, this ratio drops sharply to 3

4 0.24. This suggested that private firms are externally financially constrained. Allen et al. (2005) suggested that despite the almost nonexistence of formal mechanisms, private sector relies more on alternative mechanisms. Reputation and relationships play an important role in China. Allen et al. (2012) defined the alternative mechanisms more specifically. They document that alternative and informal channels are important which includes funds from family and friends and loans from private (unofficial) credit agencies. The alternative channels also includes illegal channels, such as smuggling, bribery, insider trading and speculations during early stages of the development of financial markets and real estate market, and other underground or unofficial business. Guariglia et al. (2011) find that private firms in China growing in a very fast rate are because of their abundant cash flow and high productivity. Hence, they do not need well developed financial markets. Combining two ideas above together, they find that in China, financial constraint is not a big obstacle. Saving policy is one way of relieving external financial constraints. Ding et al. (2013) on the other hand, find that working capital management could also help firms to alleviate the effects of financial constraints. Papers above suggested that financial constraint problems could be relieved and cash flow is not the only way of internal finance. Although firms could alleviate financing constraints with different policies or be funded from different channels, firms will invest only when investment opportunity is good enough. 2.2 Problems of Q model and the improvement of measuring q (Erickson and Whited, 2000) summarize the disappointing points of empirical studies. Firstly, as is shown from many papers, the estimation s fit of goodness (R 2 ) is very low. This suggests that average q has little explanatory power. Many empirical studies also found that fitted models imply highly implausible adjustment costs and speeds. Finally, to predict marginal q, factors li/ke output, sales, and cash flow which affect firm investment decisions should not be ignored. As is shown by Fazzari et al. (1988), the regressor of cash flow has high explanatory power. One possible reason is that marginal q is mis-measured. As most researchers suspected, the main problem with Q model is the mismeasurement of marginal q. According to (Erickson and Whited, 2000), if the marginal q is mismeasured, the OLS coefficients estimated for the mismeasured regressor is biased towards zero. Thus irrelevant variables may appear significant. 4

5 Many studies use Tobin s Q as the proxy of marginal Q. This stemmed from the reliability of market mechanism in pricing financial assets, that is, there are bubbles in stock price (Chirinko, 1993; Hubbard, 1997; Bond et al., 2004). Besides, stock price is too much volatile. Bond and Cummins (2001) said average q contains too much noise. Chirinko (1993) concerns the measurement problem of firms capital replacement costs and the tax and non-tax issues. They also argue that the conditions equating average q and marginal q are not satisfied. In addition to substitute marginal q to average Tobin s q Hayashi (1982), many suggested a lot of alternative methods to improve the measurement of marginal q. Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1995) empirically examine the role of cash flow with Q model. The authors also considered the effectiveness of Tobin s q.to solve this problem they construct a proxy for the expected discounted stream of marginal profits to investment, the fundamental q. The fundamental q is forecasted with VAR, this is because they assumed that profit normalised by the capital stock, follows an AR(1) process. Then, the expected profit could be estimated with lagged values. They assume forecasted q contains sufficient information as the fundamental q. The advantage of this method is that investment opportunity can be forecasted with current data so that bubbles of average q could be squeezed out (Gilchrist et al., 2005). Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1999) use the average return to capital as a proxy for marginal return to capital, but in an imperfect financial market, an average return to capital could also reveal a firm s financial health. The improvement, comparing with their previous study, is that they split the marginal q into two components (financial and fundamental q). They suggested that cash flow shocks cannot affect current marginal product of capital (MPK hereafter). The effect of cash flow s financing role can then be clarified. The result of reduced-form VAR (vector auto regression)analysis shows that the shock of MPK will positively cause the increase of cash flow, but the shock of cash-flow has no impact on MPK. The advantages of using VAR to test their model are: It could estimate present value with the past, and it is possible to find causality by using lagged values. The result is that investment is responsive to both fundamental q and financial q. Financial q can amplify the overall investment response to an expansionary shock. In addition, they split the sample with several criteria (i.e. bond rating, dividend payout), and they found that financially constrained firm s investment is more sensitive to financial q. Bond and Cummins (2001) and Cummins et al. (2006) use the Q theory and examined whether internal funds significantly affect investment behaviour when the q is correctly captured. They introduced a measure of 5

6 fundamentals based on securities analysts earnings forecasts ( Q) in place of the conventional [ measure ] of average q based on share price data. They assumed that Et c Π a i,t+s is the analyst s consensus forecast of earning. Cooper and Ejarque (2003) provide an alternative way to study Q model. They introduce imperfection competition and financial frictions into the model, but the results are not improved. They consider that financial constraint and market imperfection cannot explain the investment to cash flow sensitivities given average q. However, if add to Q model the market power, the fit of the model improves substantially. They argue that the apparent failure of Q theory may stem from misspecification of the firm s maximization problem. This is because maximization problem ignores market power. 3 Theoretical Framework: Measuring q from Demand and Supply Sides To prove our hypothesis that financially constrained firms care more about investment opportunities, we need to better capture investment opportunity. In our sample most of the firms are unlisted, so we do not have Tobin s q. There are many influential papers adjusted q model but few when they are studying China s firms. When calculating total profit, we need to think about two perspectives: demand and supply. Cooper and Haltiwanger (2006) assume that current profits, for given capital are given by Π(A, K) = AK θ, where A is productivity shock and K is capital. The higher productivity, the lower cost will be and the profit of each unit of product will be higher. It is obvious that net income is decided by supply and demand side together. The basic Q model could be expressed as: ( ) I = a + 1 [( ) ] V t p k t + τ K t b (1 δ)p K t + e t (1) t K t 1 p t where I t is fixed investment at time t, K t is tangible fixed assets, V t is firms value at time t, δ is depriciation rate p K t is investment price and p t is the price of output, τ t is stochastic technology shocks, e t is an idiosyncratic component. Besides, a firm s value is always assumed as the sum of discounted net revenue in future, which could be written as, 6

7 Bond and Van Reenen (2007) show that firm s net revenue is V i,t = E t [ Π i,t + β t+1 Π i,t+1 + β t+s Π i,t+s + β t+s+1 Πi,t+s+1 ] (2) The net revenue function comprises two components, which are operating profit π t and total costs of fixed capital investment C t. { πt = p t F (L t, K t : τ t ) w t L t C t = G(I t, K t : τ t ) + p I t I t (3) Then, the equation could be simplified to Π t C t and πt C t Π t C t = π t C t 1 (4) could be interpreted as the rate of return comparing with total input as the productivity of the investment. Therefore, ( ) Π ( π ) =. (5) C t C t ( ) π πt is the increase of a firm s revenue. Then, its increase rate is ( C t We could approximate the increase rate as C t / πt C t ). ( π ) ( π ) ( π ) ( π ) / ln ln = ln π t ln C t C t C t 1 C t C t 1 π t 1 C t 1 Following Abel and Eberly (1999), given predetermined capital stock, productivity, and demand, a firm can choose the the optimal input of labor, and Riddick and Whited (2009) documented that variable factors are costlessly adjustable. So we denote the opporating profits as π t = Z t K 1 γ t. (6) where Z is a combination of demand and productivity shock (Riddick and Whited, 2009; Bloom et al., 2007). Foster et al. (2008) and Wu (2014) suggest a linear combination Z t = X t (A t ) ε 1 (7) where X t is demand and A t is productivity and ε is demand elasticity over price and it is assume to be greater than one. 7

8 Then, the revenue growth rate could be decomposed as ( π ) ( π ) / = ln Z t + (1 γ) ln K t ln C t (8) C t C t 1 Z t 1 K t 1 C t 1 Obviously, ln Kt K t 1 reveals the increase of capital input. In addition, ln C i,t C i,t 1 shows the growth of total cost, which should be positively related to the increase of input. Note that it is very hard to measure the adjustment adjustment costs, which are components of total costs. In order to simplify Equation(8), we assume that the increase of labor and capital input could offset the increase of total costs but their differences (θ i,t ) are firm specific and time specific. Equation 5 could be simplified as, θ i,t = (1 γ) ln K t K t 1 ln C i,t C i,t 1 (9) ( π ) ( π ) / = ln Z t + θ i,t. (10) C i,t C i,t 1 Z t 1 The equation above shows that revenue increase is monotonically related to the technology improvement.however, firm s revenue function discussed from the supply side does not reveal the demand side of the market. If we take inventory into considerate, especially for a manufacturing firm, its output should be different from its sales, F (L t, K t : τ t ) sales. Therefore we cannot take it for granted that ( Π i,t ) = ( π i,t ) C i,t C i,t = (ln Z ( i,t π ) + θ i,t ) Z i,t 1 C ( π ) = (a + εx + θ i,t ) C As mentioned above, the growth of investment costs, C i,t C i,t, is difficult to measure and firm specific. This is because c t contains not only the total input but also adjustment costs or even fixed costs and there is no consensus on whether or not the adjustment cost is convex. We could assume that, C i,t C i,t 1 = 1 + c i,t 8 i,t 1 i,t 1

9 where c i,t is a firm specific term. Then we use sales (S) as the proxy of opporating revenue, the increase of net profit could be given as Π i,t = Π i,t Π i,t 1 = (a i,t + εx i,t + θ i,t )S i,t 1 (1 + c i,t ) + c i,t Π i,t 1 (11) where, a i,t denotes firm i s technology improvement at time t, x i,t denotes demand growth comparing with last year at time t. The equation above interprets that the expected increase of profit is jointly affected by demand growth and productivity growth. We assume that firms could forecast their one-year-ahead net profit, and they form their long term expectations based on one-year-ahead forecasts. At time t, Π i,t+1 could be writen as, Π i,t = E( Π i,t ) = Π t 1 + E( Π i,t ) (12) where Π i,t and Π i,t are estimated value of net profit and increase of net income, and Π i,t = E( Π i,t ). Then, firm s expected net income growth rate (π i,t ) could be estimated as, E( π i,t ) = E( Π i,t ) Π t (13) = Π t Π t 1 Π t (14) = (a i,t + εx i,t + θ i,t )S i,t 1 (1 + c i,t ) Π i,t 1 + c i,t. (15) Since all the expectations are formed at the end of time t or at the beginning of time t + 1, we calculate net income after t + 1 by using π i,t. The estimated firm value is, [ ] V i,t =E t Π i,t + β t+1 Π i,t+1 + β t+s Π i,t+s + β t+s+1 Πi,t+s+1 (16) [ n ] = E βt s (1 + π i,t ) s Π i,t (17) s=0 whrere β represents β(1 δ) a combination of discount factor and depreciation factor. According to equation (1), marginal q is q t = V t (1 δ)p K t K t 1, we could forecast marginal q with estimated V i,t. The estimated marginal q ( q) is 9

10 q = E [ n s=1 β s t (1 + (a i,t + εx i,t + θ i,t ) (1 + c i,t )S i,t 1 Π i,t 1 Π i,t 1 (1 δ)p K t K t 1 + c i,t ) s ] (18) This model has some advantages over previous ones: first, it could better measure marginal q. Second, productivity and demand shocks are different. This is not only because they are captured from supply and demand sides. They also capture long term and short term growth, as productivity shocks will have a long term effect while demand shocks tend to have short term effect. We are going to test how productivity and demand shocks affect firm investment decisions. 4 Empirical spcefications and estimation methodology 4.1 Baseline specification Based on FHP(1988), we estimate the most conventional equation in order to find how fixed investment respond to invest opportunities shock. The equation could be interpreted as: I it /K it = a 0 + a 1 q it + a 2 CF K it + v i + v t + vj + v jt + e it (19) q is used to capture investment opportunities and cash flow is used to capture internal finance. a 1 represents how investment opportunity could affect investment decisions and that is the key point that we are going to study. Although q is widely used and many influential studies adjusted the measurement of it, there is no single method believed as the best. Our study will discuss investment opportunities measured from three perspectives: supply side (q S ), demand side (q D ) and fundamental q. We define investment (I) as the purchase of fixed tangible assets. Investment is generated with the book value of tangible fixed assets at time t minus the book value of tangible fixed assets at time t-1 plus depreciation at time t. Investment rate (I/K)is given by the ratio of tangible fixed assets to investment. Cash flow, denoted as CFK in equation(19), is calculated as the sum of firms net profit, accumulative depreciation of fixed assets. As most of firms in NBS dataset are unlisted, Liu and Xiao (2004) questioned the reliability 10

11 of NBS data. They find that there is a propensity of profit disguising in China. Small and private firms tend to disguise more profits. However, despite of the mis-reporting error, we find that cash flow of private firms is averagely higher than other firms. The ranking of cash flow to assets ratios should not change. The measurement error could be assumed as timeinvariant (Guariglia, 2011). If the firms disguise a proportion of their profits, the growth of cash flow should not change. We include cash flow variable in our model because it is believed as an important factor to investment. Since our hypothesis is focusing on investment and investment opportunities, we are not going to discuss whether or not cash flow is a good indicator of financial constraints. We then expand our model by including control variables, namely firm size, age, the asset tangibility ratio, liquidity ratio, and export dummy. We estimate the equation of the type: I it /K it = a 0 + a 1 q it + a 2 CF K it + a 3 tangibility it + a 4 liquidity it +a 5 size it + a 6 age it + a 7 exportdummy it + v i + v t + vj + v jt + e it (20) Firm size is defined as the value of nature logarithm of real total assets. Small firms are more likely to face financial constraints but large firms are assumed to be more diversified and less prone to bankruptcy. tangibility we is hte ration of tangible assets to total assets. High tangibility firms are more likely to operate in less dynamic industries with lower growth potential (Hovakimian, 2009). So, we may expect a negative relationship between investment and tangibility. We also take liquidity into consideration. This variable is defined as the difference between a firm s current assets and its current liabilities, normalized by total assets. High liquidity could alleviate financial constraint problems but could be detrimental to profitability (Ding et al., 2013). If high liquidity have negative impact on profitability, we expect it have negative relationship with investment. Firm age is also a proxy to control financial constraint problem. It is usually assume that older firms are less likely to face asymmetric information problems and less constrained. However, in China, old firms may be less efficient (Ding et al., 2013), so firm age could have negative impact on investment. exportdummy is a dummy variable which equals to 1 if the firm exports in that year. We use export dummy because exporters are often found to be more productive than nonexporters(bernard and Jensen, 1999). This argument suggests that exporters have better investment opportunities and export behaviour will have positive impact on investment. Equation( 19 and 20) comprises five types of error terms: (1) firm specific time invariant effects (v i ); (2) time specific effects (v t ); (3) industry specific effects (v j ); (4) time specific and industry specific effects (v jt ), which are used to capture industry specific business cycles. (5) an idiosyncratic error (e it ). 11

12 We aim to find how fixed investment responds to invest opportunity shocks. According to most empirical studies (Ding et al., 2013; Chen and Guariglia, 2013), we separate our sample by four different ownerships. State owned enterprises (SOEs, we will introduce firm ownerships later) are expected to be the least financially constrained as they are likely to benefit from soft budget constraints and favoritism form state-owned banks, while private firms are most financially constrained, since banks are reluctant to lend them money. 4.2 Measurement of q 1.Investment opportunities and supply shocks: Since most firms in our dataset are unlisted, we cannot calculate Tobin s q. As we introduced in our theoretical framework, we firstly adopt the backward looking approach to find some proxies of q. According to our theoretical framework, we could find that investment opportunity could be measured from both supply and demand side. More specifically, if we exclude firm specific term, firms profit growth could be decomposed to TFP growth and sales growth. We use TFP growth as the proxy of q to control the investment opportunity from supply side. More importantly, according to Chen and Guariglia (2013), TFP will have a long term impact on firms. We measure TFP based on the method suggested by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003). 2. Investment opportunities and demand shocks: Another proxy, that is more usually apply to capture investment opportunity, is sales growth. However, it is also criticised as sales could be highly correlated with cash flow. This will affect results of estimation. However, as suggested by Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999) that sales for small firms are more sensitive to business cycle may reflects non-financial factors; and Love and Zicchino (2006) argue that sales are a more exogenous variable to measure investment opportunity since it is determined by demand side. Therefore, we still estimate the equation with sales growth. 3. Forcasted q/ Fundamental q: Besides the q we measured from supply and demand, as introduced above, we could measure investment opportunities with a forward looking and dynamic method which is usually called as forcasted q or fundamental. In our estimation we will denote it as F Q. (Please find detailed description about how to measure fundamental q in appendix.) 12

13 4.3 Estimation methodology We estimate the equations above with two methods. They both have some advantages over the other and we attempt to find some consistency between the results from two difference methods. They will be more specifically introduced as follows Panel VAR and impulse response function Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1999) (GH hereafter) and Love and Zicchino (2006) (LZ here after) suggest that investment is determined by fundamental and financial part jointly. One significant difference between our work and theirs is that they are using MPK and sales to capital ratio, but we are going to study fundamental from both supply and demand side. This is because sales may be highly correlated with cash flow. In addition we suggest that TFP is a preferable proxy when measuring marginal q. To tackle the issues above, we use impulse response function suggested by GH (1998) and LZ (2006). In our dataset, time period is very short but number of firms is very large. So, we use panel VAR (vector autoregressive). The impulse response function (IRF) shows the reaction of one variable when the one variable is shocked by a one-standard-variance while holding other shocks equal to zero. As is concerned by both GH (1998) and LZ(2006), the actual variance-covariance matrix of errors is unlikely to be diagonal, to isolate shocks to one of the variables in the system. It is necessary to decompose the residuals. It is known as Choleski decomposition. The decomposition makes residuals become orthogonal. The usual convention is to adopt a particular ordering and allocate any correlation between the residuals of any two elements to the variables that come earlier in the first in the ordering. (Please find more details about IRF and Panel VAR in appendix.) LZ (2006) explain that the identifying assumption is that the variable in front is assumed to have contemporaneous and lagged impact on the variable behind, while the variable behind could only have lagged impact on the variable in front. That is to say, the variables come earlier in the systems are more exogenous and the ones that appear later are more endogenous. Both GH(1998) and LZ (2006) use this ordering, but they put the variables in different sequences. GH (1998) suggest that I/K, the ratio of investment to capital, is exogenous and have contemporaneous impact on MPK and CF/K (cash flow scaled by capital), but assume there is no feedback from MPK shocks to I/K, or from cash flow to MPK. However, LZ (2006) assume that MPK is the exogenous variable. They use sales to capital as the proxy for MPK. They argue that the sales to capital ratio depend on the demand, which 13

14 is outside of the firms control. Investment is likely to become effective with delay since it requires time to become fully operational. Although GH(1998) and LZ (2006) have different opinion in ordering, they both agree that MPK is more exogenous than CF/K. We will use the first ordering method to estimate backward looking q and the second estiamtes forward looking q System GMM The method we use is system GMM. This is because our data have a very large N but small T. It takes into account unobserved firm heterogeneity and possible endogeneity and mismeasurement problems of the regressors. By adding the original equation in levels to the system and exploiting these additional moment conditions, Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998) found a dramatic improvement in efficiency and a significant reduction in finite sample bias compared with first-differenced GMM We instrument right hand side variable by two or more lags in level equation and three or more lags in differenced equation. 5 Data and Summary Statistics 5.1 Data The firm-level data we have come from annual surveys conducted by National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The data are collected annually on industrial firms which include all of state owned firms and non-state owned firms with sale scale above 5 million RMB( usually be called as above scale firms), from 1998 to The industries of these firms are mining, manufacturing and public utilities. The original dataset contains more than 600,000 firms and 2,000,000 observations across 31 provinces. Table (1a) provides an overview of our dataset focusing firms size. Table(1b) and Table (1c) are reported by China Statistical Yearbook (2007) (Statistical Yearbook hereafter) and Brandt et al. (2012). Brandt et al. (2012) made a significant contribution in summering NBS dataset. That is why we compare our result with theirs. Information of China Statistical Yearbook is officially published by NBS. Brandt et al. (2012) also used the firm-level above scale NBS data from 1998 to 2006, but not the same version as ours. China Statistical Yearbook (2007) does not provide the information of sales at aggregate level. The purpose is to show the representativeness of our NBS dataset. Comparing table 1(a) with (b), we found that the number of observations each year is slightly smaller than that reported by Statistical Yearbook especially in 1998 and Therefore, it is reasonable that our aggregates could 14

15 be slightly smaller than Statistical Yearbook. The results show that most of the aggregates from our dataset are either identical or slightly smaller than form Statistical Yearbook. The differences between our data set and China Statistical Yearbook is very small. So we can use our data to explain most of China economy. From our NBS data, we can find that the number of firms increases from 154,870 in 1998 to 336,696 in The increasing number shows that more firms were becoming above scale firms in this 10-year period. Especially from 2003 to 2004, the number increased 42.2%. Although all the aggregates are increasing, we find that total number of employees increases only 41.7% but total profit before tax in 2007 is more than 18 times as large as in 1998 and total sales increased 5.5 times in the 10-year period. Generally speaking, firms profit and sales grow faster than firms size (total assets, total number of employees etc.). In other words, firms in China are more profitable than before. 5.2 Ownerships As China is a transition economy, firm s capital in China is held by different investors. Our NBS data contains such information. The capital is held by six types of investors, namely the state; foreign investors; HMT investors (investors form Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan); legal entities; individuals and collective investors. Many studies group China s firms into four main ownerships by using the capital distribution. They are state owned enterprises, private firms, foreign firms, and collective firms. There are a large amount of firms shares held by state. In our sample, we group them as state owned enterprises (SOEs) if the state holds the majority of the shares (more than 50%). Basically, state gets the shares from two ways. According to Wei et al. (2005), state shares are either retained by the state or shares issued to the state through debt-equity swap when privatizing SOEs. Theoretically, these firms are owned by all the people of China, and their goal is to maximum public interests. Private firms (labelled private) refer to profit-making economic organizations, which can either be sole proprietorships, limited liability companies, or shareholding cooperatives (Poncet et al., 2010). These firms are owned by individuals. In our sample, there is one type of shareholders called legal entities. They refer to a mix of various domestic institutions and they are also known as institutional shareholders. In our sample we grouped them into private category. The reason given by Ding et al. (2013) is that the state s primary interest is political but legal entities are profit-oriented. Foreign firms (labelled foreign) are invested by foreign entities including 15

16 Table 1: Comparison of sample coverage with China Statistical Yearbook and Brandt et al. (2012) Number of firms Total assets (a) Firm-level Dataset Sum of employees (1 trillion) (10 million persons) Total equity Total fixed assets Total profit before tax (1 trillion) (1 trillion) (100 billion) (b) China Statistical Yearbook (c) Brandt et al. (2012) Nuber Firms of employment Sales , , , , , , , , , Sales (1 trillion) 16

17 Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. Collective firms (labelled collective) are defined as the firms owned collectively by communities in urban or rural areas. The production and property belonging to labouring masses and are managed by local government. 5.3 Descriptive Statistics Table(2) shows the summary statistics of key variables. We follow the method suggest by Guariglia et al (2011), cutting 1 percent tails of the key variables to control for the potential influence of outliers. We find that in Table(2), SOEs invest less than other firms averagely. Private firms and foreign firms invest higher than other kinds of ownerships. Averagely, their investment rates are 10.09% and 10.32%, respectively. We also find a high growth rate of private firms. The average total asset growth rate is 12.74% per annum. As such, we can find that private firms grow fastest in both average and aggregate level. Besides, private and foreign firms also have the highest cash flow level. The ratios of cash flow to tangible fixed assets are 43.28% and 45.86%, and the ratios of cash flow to total assets are 11.18% and 8.56% respectively. It is not hard to find that the low cash flow level of SOEs may because the average size of SOEs is larger. Sales growth of private firms is also higher than SOEs. This is consistent with their high cash flow level. Although SOEs have lower sales growth, they have the highest leverage ratio which is 73.29%. However, the leverage ratios are 58.30%, 50.29%, and 63.03% for private firms, foreign firms and collective firms respectively. The finding shows that, generally, private firms are more financially constrained while SOEs and collective firms could get more external funds. The high leverage ratio of SOEs could be explained with their high tangibility level. It shows that tangibility of SOEs (45.98%) is higher than other firms (there tangibility rate of private, foreign and collective firms are 32.75%, 29.58% and 31.77% respectively). TFP growth rates are very close to each other, especially when we take a look at medium values. In general, we find that private firms are more constrained, but invest more and grow faster. State owned firms are not constrained, but they invest less and grow slower. 6 Empirical results As many previous studies show (Allen et al., 2005; Guariglia et al., 2011; Ding et al., 2013), state owned firms and private firms are the least and most 17

18 Table 2: Summary statistics for key variables (ourtliers dropped) full sample SOEs private foreign collective I/K (6.96) (1.86) (9.00) (7.75) (5.09) {0.52} {0.45} {0.54} {0.46} {0.52} CF/K (5.31) (2.57) (20.62) (21.45) (17.50) {0.79} {0.44} {0.79} {0.90} {0.86} asset growth (4.58) (-0.22) (6.89) (5.54) (2.12) {40.14} {32.45} {41.69} {37.68} {38.6} coverage ratio (3.13) (1.02) (3.67) (3.03) (2.87) {8.00} {9.26} {4.86} {17.67} {4.60} leverage ratio (60.00) (69.40) (60.11) (49.39) (62.70) {0.79} {1.49} {0.29} {0.31} {0.35} tangibility (33.58) (45.08) (32.75) (29.58) (31.77) {21.44} {22.63} {21.10} {19.50} {21.09} liquidity (6.06) (-5.60) (5.53) (14.46) (7.17) {0.34} {0.46} {0.30} {0.32} {0.36} Sales growth (10.74) (3.63) (13.45) (11.15) (6.8) {0.45} {0.47} {0.45} {0.43} {19.05} TFP growth (16.29) (13.39) (16.61) (16.13) (16.11) {0.97} {1.21} {0.88} {1.02} {1.12} Notes: This table reports sample means, medium in round brackets, and standard deviations in curly brackets. I/K represents fixed asset investment over tangible fixed assets; CF/K, cash flow over tangible fixed assets; asset growth, the percentage growth of tangible fixed assets; coverage ratio net income over total interest payments; liquidity, current assets net of current liabilities over total assets; percentage growth of total sales. 18

19 financially constrained. They are also the most important types of firms in China. Although we will report the results for all the groups, our discussion will highlight the differences between these two groups. We firstly report the estimation results of impulse response function. We applied impulse response function to estimate how investment opportunity shocks affect investment. As we introduced above, we capture investment opportunities with three ways, TFP growth, sales growth and fundamental q. 6.1 Results of Impulse Response Function Respones of Investment to TFP Growth Shocks T Private Foreign SOEs Collective Figure 1: Investment and TFP Growth Shocks Figure (1) plots the responses of investment to TFP growth shocks. At year one, all the firms positively response to productivity shocks. Here we find that private firms are most sensitive while the collective firms shows lowest response to productivity shocks. The difference between private firms and SOEs is not large. High sensitivity of investment to TFP growth implies that investment opportunities from supply side is significant and private firms care them more. Figure(2) plots the impulse response results of investment and sales growth shocks. It is obvious that investment shows a positive response to demand shocks. Again we find that private firms show highest response to the shocks and then the foreign firms. SOEs are not very sensitive to demand shocks 19

20 Response of Investment to Sales Growth Shock T Private Foreign SOEs Collective Figure 2: Investment and Demand Shocks here. This result also suggests that investment opportunities measure from supply and demand sides are different although they both have positive impact on investment. Another implication is that investment choices are made from massive information and many indicators. Different types of firms may have different preferences. For example, SOEs are more sensitive to productivity shocks comparing with the other two, but they show the least sensitivity to demand shocks. However there is one thing unchanged, private firms show the highest response to investment opportunities in both supply and demand side. Figure(3) shows the impulse response of investment to fundamental q. As we introduced above, we construct fundamental q according to Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1999). Since fundamental q is a forward looking variable, it is suggested to have contemporaneous impact on investment decisions. So we find that there are positive impacts at time zero. The fundamental q is estimated with lagged cash flow and TFP (we exclude sales here because sales are highly correlated with cash flow. When we control lagged sales, the coefficients are not significant). Collective firms shows the highest response to fundamental q shock. Although we find that private firms are not the most sensitive ones, SOEs still show a relatively low response. 20

21 Respones of Investment to Fundamental q Shocks T Private Foreign SOEs Collective Figure 3: Investment and Fundamental q 6.2 SYS-GMM Results We also estimate the sensitivity with system GMM. The propose is to find consistency of the result with different methods and show the robustness of our results. The advantage of system GMM over impulse response method is that it could control more exogenous variables, but the method cannot measure the orthogonalised shock of one variable to investment. Table(3) shows the estimation results of equation(19). Here we use TFP growth to capture the investment opportunity from supply side. Here we find that investment of private firms and foreign firms shows higher sensitivity to TFP growth. SOEs show a lower sensitivity to TFP Growth. This finding is in line with our impulse response results and confirms that private firms are more sensitive to TFP shocks. In Table(4), we replace TFP growth with sales growth to find investment sensitivity to demand shocks. The results show that SOEs are not sensitive to demand shocks, while the other firms show very high sensitivities towards demand shocks. The result suggest that demand shocks are important for non-state owned firms. They care more about demand market, and using market demand to form their investment decisions. SOEs are supported by government, they are less subject to market forces. We then use fundamental q as the measurement of investment opportunities. The results are reported in Table(5). Since fundamental q is a proxy 21

22 Table 3: Investment TFP Growth and Cash Flow (1) (2) (3) (4) VARIABLES private SOEs foreign collective TFP Growth 0.339*** 0.128* 0.247*** (0.0562) (0.0763) (0.0870) (0.0499) CFK 0.137*** 0.193*** 0.123*** 0.112*** (0.0116) (0.0592) (0.0218) (0.0252) Observations 699,798 89, ,990 92,776 m m Hansen test p-value Notes: This table reports the estimation results of Q model using a system GMM estimator Time dummies, time interacted with industry dummies are included. Instruments are all lagged 3 times or more; Figures in parentheses are asymptotically standard errors. J is a test of over-identifying restrictions. m1 and m3 are test of 1st and 3rd serial correlations in the first-differenced residuals. Table 4: Investment Sales Growth and Cash Flow VARIABLES private SOEs Foreign collective Sales Growth 0.777*** *** 0.738*** (0.0599) (0.270) (0.236) (0.120) CFK 0.114*** 0.261*** 0.114*** ** (0.0112) (0.0626) (0.0229) (0.0278) Observations 782, , , ,417 m m Hansen test p-value Notes: This table reports the estimation results using a system GMM estimator Time dummies, time interacted with industry dummies are included. Instruments are all lagged 3 times or more; Figures in parentheses are asymptotically standard errors. J is a test of over-identifying restrictions. m1 and m3 are test of 1st and 3rd serial correlations in the first-differenced residuals. 22

23 used to estimated profit with lagged values, it is highly correlated with cash flow. So, cash flow is not controlled in the estimation. Our results suggested that private and collective firms are most sensitive to fundamental q. Their investment decisions care more about profit in short future. Again, SOEs show weak response to fundamental q. Overall, our GMM results is generally consistent with our PVAR results. With different method and different measurement of q. Our results show strong evidence that private firms cherish investment opportunities more from both supply/demand side, and forward looking terms. Table 5: Robustness: Investment FQ and Cash Flow VARIABLES private SOEs Foreign collective FQ 0.267** *** 0.225*** (0.113) (0.0684) (0.0305) (0.0486) Observations 166,453 35,684 80,447 35,697 m m Hansen test p-value Notes: This table reports the estimation results using a system GMM estimator Time dummies, time interacted with industry dummies are included. Instruments are all lagged 3 times or more; Figures in parentheses are asymptotically standard errors. J is a test of over-identifying restrictions. m1 and m3 are test of 1st and 3rd serial correlations in the first-differenced residuals. 6.3 Robustness Tests We conduct a number of robustness tests. Our research is focusing on investment opportunities, but not cash flow. However, cash flow effect plays an important role when people study firm-level investment since FHP(1988). To be consistent with FHP(1988) and many other papers (for example Ding et al. (2013), Guariglia et al. (2011) etc.), we use current cash flow. In our robustness tests, we estimate the equation(19) with lagged cash flow as additional control. This is because cash flow could have lagged impact on investment. Lagged investment is also informative to investment (Bloom et al., 2007). Using lagged cash flow term is also consistent with our impulse response estimation, where we follow Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1999) suggest cash flow has lagged impact on investment. After we control lagged cash flow, as is shown in Table(6), the coefficients change significantly. Lagged cash flow shows positive and higher significance over current cash flow. More importantly coefficients of TFP growth is no longer significant for SOEs, foreign and collective firms. This is not unusual 23

24 Table 6: Robustness: Investment TFP Growth and Cash Flow VARIABLES private SOEs Foreign collective TFP growth ** (0.0218) (0.0466) (0.0530) (0.0309) CFK ** (0.0856) (0.0746) (0.0658) (0.0619) L.CFK 0.224*** 0.109** *** (0.0530) (0.0526) (0.0374) (0.0554) Observations 411,886 46, ,154 49,025 m m Hansen test p-value 2.59e Notes: This table reports the estimation results using a system GMM estimator Time dummies, time interacted with industry dummies are included. Instruments are all lagged 3 times or more; Figures in parentheses are asymptotically standard errors. J is a test of over-identifying restrictions. m1 and m3 are test of 1st and 3rd serial correlations in the first-differenced residuals. because cash flow follows AR(1) process, and contains the information of investment opportunities. Although the coefficients change, we could still find that private firms shows a higher sensitivity to TFP growth from both magnitude and significance than SOEs. The results also suggest that investment of private firms is subject to productivity even if we control current and lagged cash flow values. We again replace TFP growth with sales growth and control current and lagged cash flow. The magnitude and significance of sales growth decrease comparing with our previous tests. What is interesting is that for foreign firms, after we controlled current and lagged cash flow, foreign firms still show significant sensitivity to investment. Although we know that cash flow contains some information of investment opportunities, it cannot include all the information of demand. In addition, the table shows that SOEs are weakly affected by demand. This could answer our research question. State owned firms have support from the government, but their investment behaviour is not following the investment opportunities. The results in both Table(6) and Table(7) show an identical feature, that when investment opportunities can lagged cash flow controlled, coefficients of current cash flow are not significant. Also, we find that the significance of investment opportunities are reduced. This may be because current cash flow contains some information of investment opportunities. To show our results are robust, we then only use lagged cash flow variable. Table (8) and Table (9) still show the same pattern as we discussed above. Private firm investment shows highest sensitivity to productivity and second 24