地方城投债、数字经济与企业债务融资成本OACHSSCD

With the rapid expansion of local government financing vehicles(LGFVs),Chengtou bonds have become a major borrowing instrument for Chinese local governments.Against the backdrop of relatively scarce financial resources,the"quasi-municipal bond"attribute of Chengtou bonds and their implicit government credit support give them a clear advantage over ordinary corporate debt in the debt financing market.As a result,they may crowd out credit and bond funds that should have flowed to real-sector firms,triggering a"crowding-out effect"and exacerbating firms' difficulties in accessing affordable financing.Meanwhile,the fast-growing digital economy has deeply penetrated the financial sector.By reducing information asymmetry and expanding financing channels,it offers new practical avenues for mitigating the crowding-out effect caused by Chengtou bonds. Against this background,using data on Chengtou bonds at the prefecture level and financial data of listed firms from 2010 to 2021,this study finds that the increase in the scale of Chengtou bonds significantly increases the debt financing costs of local listed firms,indicating that Chengtou bonds indeed crowd out corporate debt financing.Further mechanism analysis reveals that Chengtou bonds affect corporate financing costs through two channels.The first is the demand competition mechanism,whereby LGFVs occupy credit resources and reduce the share available to firms.The second is the price competition mechanism,under which firms must offer higher interest rates or additional collateral and pledges to attract fund suppliers,thereby pushing up financing costs.Threshold regressions and empirical tests of mechanism-related variables confirm these dual pathways,providing clear evidence of the crowding-out effect.When examining the moderating role of the digital economy,the study finds that digital economic development significantly alleviates this effect.The digital economy weakens the competitive advantages of Chengtou bonds through multiple channels and improves firms' relative positions in the financing market.In terms of mechanism differences,the study shows that the digital economy primarily mitigates the crowding-out effect of Chengtou bonds on corporate financing by alleviating the demand competition mechanism,while its influence on price competition is relatively limited. Compared with the existing literature,the marginal contributions of this study lie in the following aspects.First,it introduces an innovative research perspective.Previous studies on mitigating the crowding-out effect of Chengtou bonds have mainly focused on government debt management policies and banking supervision.This study incorporates digital economic development into the analytical framework and reexamines the competitive relationship between firms and local governments in the debt financing market from the perspective of information technology and resource allocation efficiency,offering a new lens for the traditional"Chengtou bonds-financing costs"research.Second,it contributes an innovative mechanism.The study constructs a dual-pathway model-demand competition and price competition-to describe how Chengtou bonds influence corporate financing costs,and further incorporates the nonlinear moderating effect of the digital economy,thus enriching the understanding of interactions between digital economic development and local government debt.Third,it innovates in identification strategy.Prior studies on the economic consequences of Chengtou bonds have mostly relied on linear analytical frameworks.By employing a threshold regression model,this study verifies the threshold effect of the digital economy on the crowding-out effect,providing new evidence on the complex relationships among Chengtou bonds,the digital economy,and corporate debt financing costs while accounting for structural changes in the data.