중소기업 정책자금의 미시적 성과 분석과 역할에 관한 연구

One of the important empirical propositions associated with a conventional concave production function is the principle of diminishing marginal returns to capital, which implies that firms with relatively little capital can be able to earn higher marginal returns to capital than richer firms. In principle, poorer SMEs have higher willingness to pay for interest rates. Then our question is about why commercial banks have difficulty in serving SMEs, even firms with seemingly high future performance. Among others, the important factors are the lenders' incomplete information about SMEs and the firms' lack of collateral to offer as security to commercial banks. Commercial banks would like to charge higher interest rates for the riskier borrowers than the safer firms in order to compensate for the increased probability of default. In some cases, lending banks may ask firms to buy their financial service, insurance or to deposit. If banks are able to evaluate information on SMEs, these problems can be eliminated. However, banks face relatively higher transaction costs in serving many SMEs than serving one large transaction for large companies. High interest rates are associated with screening SMEs, monitoring the use of loans, and enforcing repayments. This means that the adoption of new technologies are discouraged; and it would make SMEs poorer and reduce the demand for loans. As a way of breaking this vicious circle for SMEs, it is necessary to reduce transaction costs and overcome information problems. For the assistance of increasing productivity and labor demand of the prospective SMEs, thus, the policymakers have responsibility for providing funds to SMEs. Policy loans can be implemented to compensate commercial banks' losses due to high transaction costs and inherent risks. These are also used to keep borrowing rates low for SMEs. 'Small and medium Business Corporation'(SBC) in Korea is a representative non-profit, government-funded organization established to implement such government policies for the development of SMEs. Through financial programs, SBC provides financial loans for prospective SMEs that have experienced difficulties in obtaining commercial bank loans. With policy fund, promising firms with the lack of good quality credit information can borrow needed fund at a low interest rates. Government-sponsored fund is to promote SME's facility investment, restructuring, commercialization of new technology, and other start-up activities. Narrow meaning of policy fund of SBC, which is mainly financed by issuing bond and government budget, has relatively long-term maturity (i. e. about 70 percentage of issued bond has 3-5 year expiration). Also, although it depends on the credit evaluation of the borrowing firms, the difference between commercial borrowing rates and policy fund financing interest rates is about 2% point as of 2009. About half of policy loans are direct lending by the SBC, while the last half are consigned loan through commercial banks. In the case of consigned loan, commercial banks get fees or service charges from SBC, which is about 1% of the total borrowing fund. But banks take all the risk from the lending to SMEs. Then when can financial market intervention be justified? If markets are already functioning well, intervention won't be necessary. Thus, making justification about interventions requires the performance analysis of policy loans. In this regard, a few studies suggest evidence on impacts from policy loans in Korea. However, all of them used data associated with firms with relatively large sizes, in terms of employees, to the actual recipients of policy loans. As mentioned, in the case of holding diminishing marginal returns to capital, it is required to use proper data to overcome the underestimation of impacts of the policy loan. Also, with the launching of Korea Finance Corporation in October 2009, which is a policy-based finance institution that also supports SMEs with high growth potential by providing indirect financing (which is so called on-lending scheme) through intermediary lending institutions, there would be duplicate supports for the SMEs and hence the possibility of creating inefficiency in SME financial policy. In this paper, using firm-level data, we empirically analyze the outcomes of SMEs investment associated with policy loan. We concern whether the loans made firms profitable-or do recipients simply have easier access to commercial credit without policy loans. In our empirical model, we very take care of outlier problems of the small firms' business statistics as well as minimizing the selection bias. We performs an initial screening based on Cook's distance (> 1) to eliminate gross outlier before calculating starting values. Then we do Huber-type robust estimation. First, we find that, other things being equal, policy-loan program has significantly positive profit-enhancing effects on SMEs for the short-term period after the program applied. The magnitude of that effect on firm profitability is greater for the direct financing than the indirect financing through commercial banks. The positive profit-enhancing effect is also stronger for the start-up companies and SMEs in their early stages rather than old SMEs. Second, empirical finding shows that policy loan has significantly positive effect on the growth rate of sales. In this case, on average, the positive effect of policy loan on the growth rates of sales is greater for the consigned loan than the direct lending. However, the magnitude of effect on the growth rate of sales is greater for the loans associated with venture firms in their start-up and early growth stages and with the commercialization of intellectual property and R&D results. Third, the effect of financial accessibility of the recipients to the commercial credit without policy loans has not been found in our financial data. SME financing is essentially about providing loans. Our results imply that, when providing policy loans, it is more desirable to target the prospective young SMEs rather than matured firms. In particular, for the policy loans associated with financing for venture firms in their start-up and early growth stages and for the commercialization of intellectual property and R&D results, it is more desirable to provide financial support by the direct lending via SBC rather than by consigned loans through commercial banks. In the period of low interest rates, however, the effect of policy loan is relatively diminished. Recognizing that SBC provides both financial and non-financial programs for SMEs, with accumulated non-financial experience including consulting, training, and marketing to strengthen the competitiveness of SMEs, it is desirable for SBC to provide tailored solutions to SMEs based on detailed management analysis. This also can be means to support SMEs while differentiating from Korea Finance Corporation's on-lending business model as means to support SMEs.