Fintech, Information Heterogeneity, and the Regional Distribution Effects of Corporate Financing Constraints

Our research titled "FinTech, Information Heterogeneity, and the Regional Distribution Effects of Corporate Financing Constraints" explores the dual role of Fintech in China's banking sector from 2010 to 2021. We utilize bank-enterprise relationship data to demonstrate how Fintech serves as a "double-edged sword." While it improves banks' ability to access standardized information, thereby easing financing constraints in less developed regions, it simultaneously hampers their capacity to handle non-standardized information, which could negate these benefits. The datasets used in this study include:Enterprise characteristic data, primarily from the Wind database, covering 2,514 non-financial A-share listed companies in central and western China.Per-loan data, sourced from the CSMAR database, featuring approximately 130,000 loan entries.
Fintech data of banks, mainly from the "Peking University Chinese Commercial Bank Digital Transformation Index" (Xie and Wang, 2022), which includes digital transformation data for 221 Chinese banks. The study covers the period from 2010 to 2021. It is important to note that the primary dataset is sourced from the CSMAR database, containing bank loan information to listed companies. This is a paid resource, typically accessed through institutional subscriptions. For the Fintech data, we used the "Index of Digital Transformation of Chinese Commercial Banks" published by Peking University (Xie & Wang, 2022). Access to this dataset requires direct communication with Peking University's research team. Due to copyright and data privacy concerns, specific names of listed companies or their stock codes have not been disclosed. These details have been omitted from the data files in compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Finally, according to the Readme file and the provided code, the results presented in this paper can be replicated.