Stock market activities, economic growth and firm growth: evidence from China

Abstract

How important is the financial market for economic growth? It can be argued that from the supply perspective that a well-functioning stock market boosts economic growth by lowering the cost of the firm to access public funds for new investment opportunities to expand business and production. Another view suggests that from the demand perspective that stock markets create a wealth effect on consumption for economic growth. In turn, the growth induces more demand for financial services and so the growth of the stock market. Both the supply and the demand argument imply a positive relationship between the stock market and the economy. Exactly how the behaviour of investors in trading stocks on a stock market can affect the performance of the firm is unclear. The study of this question helps to understand how stock trading activities can affect manufacturing production and so the growth of an economy from the perspective of the micro structure of a market. China as the largest emerging economy in the world has experienced the fastest growth of the economy and rapid development of its stock market over the last 30 years. It provides us with an excellent case to study the question on how the momentum of paper trading of shares can be transmitted to the growth of industry and firms which is a determined part of a real economy. The thesis takes China to study the question in an attempt to discover the micro mechanism of transmission as its key contribution to the existing literature on the study of the stock market effect on economic growth. The thesis employs a fixed effects model to estimate longitudinal firm-level data comprising 2233 heterogeneous Chinese listed firms over the period 2005–2015. In our estimation, it finds how stronger stock-trading performance can induce an increase in external funding of the firm. It then shows how the improvement in a firm’s financing ability will turn to improvements in inter-firm reallocations of resources towards the more productive firms. However, the presence of equity over-trading appears to hinder the growth of firm business, possibly because the negative externalities of the speculative trading outweigh the effect of the positive externalities, such as excessive volatility that creates high risk of stock investment. Overall, empirically, the thesis establishes a micro-economic structure of transmission from stock trading activities to the growth of the firm. The structure explains the importance of stock markets on economic growth from the supply perspective of an economy.