Government-sponsored Venture Capital and Corporate Financial Constraints: Wish-fulfilled or Backfired?

Has the establishment goal of China’s government-sponsored venture capital to alleviate corporate financing difficulties achieved? This paper conducts a systematic study on this based on the micro data of listed companies and manually collected government-sponsored venture capital data. The empirical results steadily show that government-sponsored venture capital can effectively alleviate the degree of subsequent corporate financial constraints, thus the Chinese government’s involvement in venture capital activities has been effective and largely achieved the original purpose for which it was established. Furthermore, government-sponsored venture capital with a higher shareholding ratio, multi-joint investments, and higher political levels has a stronger effect on alleviating the financial constraints of funded enterprises. Heterogeneity analysis shows that government-sponsored venture capital has a stronger effect on enterprises in the environment of underdeveloped economy and low institutional quality, enterprises facing high environmental uncertainty and high competition, private enterprises, and enterprises in the period of growth and turbulence, the feature of which is like “timely help”. The mechanism test shows that government-sponsored venture capital can not only significantly reduce the degree of corporate information asymmetry through the role of certification, but also exert the resource effect of political connections, including significantly promoting bank-enterprise relations and the ability of enterprises to obtain trade credit, and increasing the government subsidies that enterprises receive, thereby reducing the financial burden of enterprises and alleviating their financial constraints. The analysis of economic consequences shows that government-sponsored venture capital can significantly reduce the cost of equity capital and debt capital for the external financing of enterprises, helping to improve the problem of expensive financing for enterprises, and contributes to the sound development of enterprises in innovation and operation. However, government-sponsored venture capital has not played an effective role in supervision, and cannot alleviate the principal-agent conflicts of enterprises, especially it will lead to a significant increase in the first type of agency costs, and the increase in executive compensation plays an important role. Therefore, in the future development of government-sponsored venture capital, it is necessary to grasp the degree of “government role” intervention, and improve the supervision and management mechanism of government-sponsored venture capital over enterprises. At the same time, taking into account the uneven development of regions, it is important to provide appropriate and necessary assistance to the development of government-sponsored venture capital in the central and western regions, so as to promote the rapid development of government-sponsored venture capital in the new era.