Heterogeneity Effect of Corporate Financialization on Total Factor Productivity

As corporate financialization becomes an important stylized fact, policymakers and economists are concerned that corporate financialization may harm firms' productivity by reducing operation investment. However, no previous literature has assessed the heterogeneous effect of corporate financialization on total factor productivity induced by self-selection. In this study, we do so by leveraging the framework of marginal treatment effects (MTE) using samples of Chinese listed non-financial companies during the period from 2007 to 2018. We find that firms with high resistance to financialization can result in gains in productivity by choosing financialization. In contrast, firms with low resistance to financialization have a significant reduction in total factor productivity (TFP) when choosing financialization. Meanwhile, based on our counterfactual analysis, a stable fluctuation of housing growth is shown to have a significant impact on total factor productivity improvement, and the evidence is supportive of the TFP loss being mitigated by a stable housing market. Moreover, the mechanism analysis confirms a strong negative impact of financialization on innovation, which is the potential channel to depress aggregate total factor productivity. The detected heterogeneity effect highlights the importance of housing price in the self-selection of financialization choices to affect the TFP. Policymakers may wish to focus on corporate financialization, which is accompanied by inhibition in TFP growth, keeping the housing market stable in order to minimize the side effects of financialization on productivity.