“…Often with better access to bank loans and enjoying more commercial credit, a core firm in SCF can share its financial resources with other firms in the supply chain or provide guarantees to facilitate small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to borrow bank loans. Given the outstanding lending preference towards state-owned enterprises (SOEs) ( Xu and Lin, 2007 ; Fu et al, 2015 ; Xu et al, 2015 ), and the traditional bias against either SMEs or those of private ownership ( Allen et al, 2005 ; He et al, 2019 ; Li et al, 2020a ; Li et al, 2020b ; Wu and Xu, 2020 ), SCF has been growing rapidly in the largest bank-based economy ( Lin and Zhang, 2020 ; Song et al, 2020 ).…”