관계금융이 기업혁신에 미치는 영향: 한국의 중소기업을 대상으로

This study investigates the role of relationship banking in innovation financing of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), by verifying which of soft information hypothesis and information monopoly hypothesis in financing for corporate innovation is more suitable. For SMEs in Korean stock markets from 2004 to 2017, this study reports non-linear relationships between the two proxies for relationship banking and the number of patent applications. Using piecewise regression techniques, this study confirms that these non-linearities are inverted-U shaped. That is, relationship banking, in which bank-firm relationships are formed at an appropriate level, is beneficial for SMEs’ innovation (soft information hypothesis), while closer formation of the relationships exceeding the appropriate level incurs costs to SMEs (information monopoly hypothesis). This finding remains robust in Poisson, negative binomial, and Tobit regressions considering econometric problems that seem as characteristics on the data of the dependent variable. In further analyses, this study finds that relationship banking improves the accessibility of external financing to financially constrained SMEs with moderate bank-firm relationships, but hinders financing innovation for constrained SMEs whose bank-firm relationships are formed above an appropriate level.