소기업·소상공인 신용보증지원제도 : 현황과 효과

Ensuring access to credit has been an important pillar of public support for small business in Korea. Loan guarantees are one mechanism used to mitigate credit rationing on small firms. The aim of this article is to analyse the role played by public guarantee programs on bank loan interest rates using an sample data on 84,331 small firms loans coverd by the public guarantee programs from July 2014 to December 2015. Data has been taken from Korea Federation of Credit Guarantee Foundations. We estimate a standard loan pricing model in which the effective loan rate is regressed on loan-contract, individual-firm and bank characteristics, as well as on guarantee-factor variable. The factor variable categorizes the full-guarantees covering the whole loan amount and the partial-guarantees. Our results show that risk premiums are lower for the fully guaranteed loans than for the partially guaranteed ones, which supports that public guarantee programs perform the role of cutting down on the loan rates. Other variables have the predicted signs: the coefficients of firm age and loan size are significantly negative and the loan rates on self-owned businesses are lower than on third-party firms. Empirical studies on the firms which received guarantees more than once show that the rates on the second loans are higher than the first loans, which indicates the presence of hold-up problems in Korean financial markets.