Financing of Physical and Intangible Capital Investments in China

摘要

We used firm-level micro panel data for industrial firms in China from 2000 to 2009, which were drawn from a novel database, to study their methods of financing physical and intangible capital investments. Regarding non-listed domestic firms, our findings were as follows: (1) trade credit finances physical capital investments. (2) The complementary relationship between internal and external sources of finance changes from that between cash flows and trade credit to that between cash flows and bank loans as investment risk increases. (3) However, firms forgo debt finance, including bank loans, and rely instead on internal cash flows for financing investments under exceedingly risky conditions, such as the financing of intangible capital investments by financially-constrained high-tech firms.