Impact of COVID-19 on Financial Constraints and the Moderating Effect of Financial Technology

ABSTRACT

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has made enterprises in various countries face extreme financial constraints. Using the quarterly data of Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2020, we examine the impact of COVID-19 on financial constraints and the moderating effect of financial technology. We find that while COVID-19 has increased enterprises’ financial constraints, the development of financial technology can mitigate its negative impact. The results still hold under various robustness checks. While the COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing, there is scope for the future development of financial technology to help protect and revive the global economy.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• fintech
• financial constraints

JEL:

• G14
• G30
• O30

Acknowledgments

We thank editors Susan Sunila Sharma and Yezhou Sha, discussant Krishna Reddy and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All errors are our own.

Declaration Of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. We also generate the predicated year-2019 and year-2020 fintech data based on the 2011–2018 data and use them in the regression. All the results still hold. Details available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

The paper is supported by the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of China [Project NO. 16YJC630173] and the Social science planning and research project of Shandong Province of China [Project NO.19CJRJ13].