ARTICLE | China Economic Review | Vol. 36, 2015

Abstract

Real estate price appreciation can lessen firm’s financial constraint by increasing its collateral value. This paper studies this channel by utilizing a large firm-level dataset during the 2000-2007 period on Chinese firms. In contrast to [30] that collateral channel effect in China does not exist either for firms overall or for private firms, we provide empirical evidence on the presence of collateral channel effect and show the effect is significant for private firms but not significant for state owned enterprises, whose behavior is more of political based. Further analysis shows that firms significantly change their debt structures in response to real estate price shocks.