Alternative finance and credit sector reforms: the case of China

This paper studies the impact of credit sector reforms in a general equilibrium framework where heterogeneous firms choose their optimal investment and how to finance it. Besides retained earnings and bank loans, I focus on the crucial role played by alternative sources of funding, including family, friends, non-listed equity and informal banking institutions. While small young enterprises face important difficulties to finance their investment, these alternative financing sources allow them to partially bypass credit constraints. The model can account for the financing patterns observed in Chinese data. Despite an increase in non-performing loans by 11%, liberalizing the banking sector increases the steady-state aggregate level of capital by 10% and the steady-state aggregate production by 5%, inducing efficiency gains and a welfare increase of 1.8%. Selectively tightening the regulation of the alternative finance sector, if simultaneous to bank liberalization, may prevent the rise in non-performing loans while preserving most welfare improvements. This remains however detrimental to the development of small, young enterprises and limits efficiency gains.