Industry Clustering and Financial Constraints: A Reinterpretation Based on Fixed Asset Liquidation

This article reinvestigates the effects of industry clustering on financial constraints, with a focus on the firm-bank interplay. In a model featuring asymmetrical information, firms pledge fixed assets as collateral for bank loans. The amount of borrowing is limited by the collateral’s market value. By increasing the number of bidders in the case of liquidation auctions, industry clustering raises the collateral’s market value and relaxes financial constraints. This effect is weaker if firms tend to receive a synchronized negative shock but is stronger if they tend to exhibit high valuation of fixed assets. These predictions are confirmed by China’s firm-level survey data. In particular, industry clustering reduces investment–cash flow sensitivity, and the effect is larger in industries with low correlations between sales values and GNP, large coefficients of variation of sales growth, and a large share of fixed assets in total assets. These conclusions are robust to model specifications and can be extended to analyses on various symptoms of financial constraints. They are also valid considering the issue of endogeneity.