Bank system reform and outward foreign direct investment of Chinese enterprises

ABSTRACT

Using a panel of Chinese domestic enterprises over the 2002–2008 period, we assess the effect of the state-owned commercial bank shareholding reform on the domestic enterprises' outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) decisions. We find that a modern market-oriented bank system significantly increases the likelihood of OFDI, especially for the purpose of facilitating trade and services.

KEYWORDS:

• Bank shareholding reform
• outward FDI
• difference-in-differences
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F21
• G21
• G18

Acknowledgements

We thank the Editor and the anonymous reviewer for their careful evaluation and valuable suggestions of the paper. Xiao acknowledges the financial support from the National Social Science Fund (China) [No. 16CRK002]. Shao acknowledges the financial support form the National Natural Science Funds (China) [No. 71601094] and the “Double-First Class” Construction 100-Level Social Science Project “One Belt One Road and China’s Global Value Chain Reconstruction” of Nanjing University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We follow Dai and Xu (2017) to calculate the firm-level export-/import-weighted exchange rate and fill in 0 for nonexporting firms. In order to calculate these variables, we need the transaction-level trade data from China’s General Administration of Customs, the nominal exchange rate data from the International Financial Statistics and the consumer price indices from the Penn World Table. Then, we merge these weighted exchange rates to our sample (based on the ASIF dataset) by Yu (2015)’s method.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Social Science Fund (China) [No. 16CRK002], the National Natural Science Funds(China) [No. 71601094] and the “Double-First Class” Construction 100-Level Social Science Project “One Belt One Road and China's Global Value Chain Reconstruction” of Nanjing University.