In recent years, frequent debt default incidents in China’s capital market have posed severe challenges to financial market stability. Against this backdrop, how to effectively mitigate corporate default risks through bond market reforms has become an urgent issue. As one of the key initiatives for opening China’s bond market to the outside world, the Bond Connect mechanism has significantly enhanced the interconnection between domestic and overseas bond markets, aiming to improve the overall quality of bond-issuing enterprises and thereby promote the stable operation of China’s financial system.
Based on this context, this paper selects A-share listed companies in China from 2007 to 2022 as research samples, treats the implementation of the Northbound Trading mechanism under Bond Connect as an exogenous shock, and constructs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to empirically test the economic consequences of this mechanism from the perspective of corporate debt default risk. The results show that the implementation of the Bond Connect mechanism significantly reduces the debt default risk of target enterprises. Further mechanism analysis reveals that this effect is more pronounced among enterprises with weaker internal or external governance, indicating that Bond Connect is particularly effective in mitigating debt default risk in contexts of weak corporate governance. Heterogeneity tests further find that the external governance effect of the Bond Connect is more prominent in contexts characterized by lower information disclosure quality, higher levels of interest expropriation, weaker investor protection, lower levels of institutional investor research, and higher enterprise risk levels. The results of this paper indicate that deepening the opening of the bond market helps reduce corporate default risk by strengthening external governance mechanisms, enhancing the robustness and risk resilience of the financial system, which has important policy implications.
The research contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in the following two aspects First, starting from the Bond Connect mechanism, it systematically analyzes the direct economic consequences of bond market interconnectivity at the level of corporate debt default risk. By taking the Bond Connect policy as an entry point, this paper effectively links macro-level policy shocks with micro-level market responses, aiming to reveal the external governance function of Bond Connect, thereby expanding the literature on the economic consequences of bond market opening and filling gaps in existing research in this area. Second, this paper also enriches research on the determinants and governance mechanisms of corporate debt default. By treating the implementation of the Bond Connect mechanism as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper provides new empirical evidence on factors affecting corporate default risk, offering useful reference for subsequent research in related fields.
Overall, by deeply exploring the cross-border bond market interconnection mechanism, this paper further enriches research in related fields. This paper also examines the risks and opportunities brought by Bond Connect from a dialectical perspective, aiming to provide valuable policy insights for enterprises, market participants, and regulatory authorities to help them better adapt to the new landscape of bond market opening, improve enterprise quality, prevent financial risks, and promote high-quality development.
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