Abstract: “Zombie Lending” refers to those enterprises that have low productivity, lose profitability, and can only survive by relying on subsidies and preferential interest rates from the government or financial institutions (especially commercial banks). These enterprises have become one of the important obstacles to the high-quality development of China's economy. Then, in China, as the most important mean of macro-control and the main channel of real economy financing, how does the bank's stability affect the formation of zombie lending? Under the procedure of interest rate marketization reform, what role does the bank competition play? The relationship and influence mechanism between these variables are the main topic that this paper wants to explore.
To answer the questions above, this paper first establishes a two-period commercial bank model, which takes the bank's stability level as a constraint, controls the commercial bank's disposal scale of zombie lending, and incorporates the bank competition variable into the constraint condition. Based on this model, this paper puts forward three pairs of hypotheses to be tested. Then, based on the existing literature, this paper identifies zombie enterprises in the industrial enterprise database by interest expenditure and debt scale. In terms of bank stability, this paper selects asset quality, profitability and capital adequacy as three aspects to select non-performing loan ratio, provision coverage ratio, and total asset return rate as proxy variables for bank stability in this paper, and regresses them with zombie lending. On this basis, based on the model analysis, this paper takes bank competition as a mediating variable for mediating effect analysis to clarify the influence mechanism of the above analysis. In terms of data sources, this paper's zombie enterprise data comes from China's industrial enterprise database from 2000 to 2013. In terms of indicator selection for commercial bank competition level, this paper constructs Herfindahl Index (HHI) by the number of commercial bank branches in each province to represent the bank competition level in that province.
The main findings of this study are as follows: the stability of commercial banks can effectively reduce the amount of zombie lending. Commercial banks aim to maximize their own profits, so they have a potential motivation to dispose of zombie lending that jeopardizes their long-term profit level. When commercial banks have a higher level of stability, they can better deal with zombie lending and improve their asset quality. Enterprises with shorter establishment years, non-state-owned, non-manufacturing and small and medium-sized enterprises are more affected by a change in bank stability. These enterprises are relatively small in scale and do not have long-term and comprehensive business with banks like large state-owned enterprises, so they tend to be disposed of at first. The improvement of bank stability can reduce the amount of zombie lending by alleviating the inter-bank competition of commercial banks. The stable operation of banks often accompanies relatively conservative capital allocation and higher credit thresholds. At the same time, when commercial banks have a higher level of stability, they correspond to a period when various performance indicators are better. At this time, the risk-taking willingness decreases, so does the market competition level of commercial banks to a certain level. When the market competition level declines, zombie enterprises with poor debt repayment ability and high risk are no longer favored by commercial banks, thus reducing the degree of support for zombie enterprises by the financial system, and then the amount of zombie lending by decreasing relative loans. Therefore, the stability of commercial banks may resolve the zombie lending problem.

Key words: zombie lending, weak bank, bank competition, mediating effect

摘要： 企业僵尸化问题是我国经济高质量发展的阻碍之一,而银行作为我国宏观调控的重要环节和实体经济融资最基本渠道,银行的稳健性与竞争水平必然对企业僵尸化产生重要影响,明确其关系及影响机理对处置化解僵尸企业风险具有重要意义。针对这个问题,本文提出两期商业银行模型从理论上分析两者间的关系,并通过工业企业数据库识别僵尸企业进行实证研究。研究发现,银行稳健性的提升可显著降低僵尸企业数量,且银行竞争在其中起到了中介作用。此外,通过异质性分析发现,成立年限短、非国有的中小型僵尸企业在商业银行稳健性提升后将被优先清理处置。基于实证结果,本文进一步提出以提高银行监管绩效的长期性和控制市场无序竞争为治理僵尸企业的思路。

关键词: 僵尸企业, 银行稳健性, 银行竞争, 中介效应