ABSTRACT

In empirical literature, it is hypothesized that the persistence of Business Groups (BGs) is linked to the capability of easing the financing constraints of participating firms through the implementation of an internal capital market (ICM). ICMs enable capital relocation, thus partially offsetting disparities in accessing bank credit. I offer three contributions. First, I formally ground this idea with a dynamic model in which an ICM is endogenously generated as a function of the bank's lending policy and firms' production incentives. A novelty in the literature, the model contains a trickle-down mechanism which allows bank credit to circulate across firms via inter-firm loans. Second, I study the model to understand how the ICM reacts to shocks to the following empirically critical channels: the BG's debt-to-equity ratio, the profitability of production markets and, most importantly, the bank's credit rationing policy. The model disentangles the contribution of each channel on the shape of the ICM, as measured in terms of the intensity of firms' cross-subsidization. In particular, I discover a non-monotonic relationship between the latter dimension and the intensity of cross-subsidization. Third, I match stylized facts of the so called ‘Korean crisis’ and apply the model to discipline some extant results of the empirical literature: I find that a tightening of the financial market, taken in isolation, would contribute to a densification of the ICM structure, reflecting the functioning of the credit-reallocation channel described in the literature. At the same time, the magnitude of such effect is not sufficiently strong to overcome the reduction in density as caused by the two alternative channels.

摘要

在实证文献中，假设业务组 (BG) 的持续存在与通过实施内部资本市场 (ICM) 缓解参与公司融资约束的能力有关。ICM 能够实现资本转移，从而部分抵消了获得银行信贷方面的差距。我提供三个贡献。首先，我用一个动态模型正式建立了这个想法，在该模型中，ICM 是作为银行贷款政策和公司生产激励的函数而内生产生的。文献中的一个新颖之处在于，该模型包含一种涓滴机制，允许银行信贷通过公司间贷款在公司之间流通。其次，我研究模型以了解 ICM 如何对以下经验关键渠道的冲击做出反应：BG 的债务权益比率，生产市场的盈利能力，最重要的是银行的信贷配给政策。该模型分解了每个渠道对 ICM 形状的贡献，以公司交叉补贴的强度来衡量。特别是，我发现后一个维度与交叉补贴的强度之间存在非单调关系。第三，我匹配所谓的“韩国危机”的程式化事实，并应用该模型来约束实证文献的一些现存结果：我发现金融市场的收紧，孤立地考虑，将有助于 ICM 的密集化结构，反映了文献中描述的信用再分配渠道的功能。同时，