主题：Finance and Firm Volatility

　　主讲人：陈涛，南洋理工大学助理教授

　　时间：5月7日（周二）下午15:00-17:30

　　地点：A208

　　主办单位：武汉大学经济与管理学院会计系，武汉大学财务与会计研究所

　　主讲人简介：

　　Tao Chen joined Nanyang Business School (NBS) as an Assistant Professor in Finance in 2014. His research interest includes corporate finance and corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, tax avoidance, earnings management, and banking and financial institutions. He has published his work in Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of Corporate Finance. His papers have been presented at major finance conferences including AFA, WFA, EFA, NBER, AAA, FIRS, ABFER, CICF, CFRC, Finance Down Under, ECCCS, FMA, NTU ICF, AsFA, and Fed, and covered by Financial Times and VoxEU. He has received CUHK Young Scholars Award, NBS Teaching Award, and Outstanding Paper Award in Annual Conference on Asia-Pacific Financial Markets.

　　讲座主要内容：

　　The online trading platform Alibaba provides financial technology (FinTech) credit for millions of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Using a novel dataset of weekly sales and an internal credit score threshold that governs the allocation of credit, we apply a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to explore the causal effect of credit access on firm volatility. We find that credit access significantly reduces firm sales volatility and that the effect is strongly countercyclical. We also find that the negative effect on firm volatility is concentrated in firms that are young, that are in regions with lower economic growth and poorer legal environment and contract enforcement, and that are in more competitive industries. We further look at firm exit probability and find that firms with access to FinTech credit are less likely to go bankrupt or exit the business in the future. Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of FinTech credit in MSMEs.

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