Since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008, the problem of “shifting from real to virtual” in China’s economic development has become increasingly apparent. At the macro level, a large amount of capital flows into the capital market, which brings about the abnormal prosperity of the capital market, while the development of the real industry is increasingly depressed, and the micro level is characterized by enterprise financialization. In the face of such a situation, the Chinese government has formulated and implemented a series of industrial policy to realize the sound development of economy. It can be seen that industrial policy is the macro-control made by government departments in order to make up for the market failure, and it is an important means to intervene in the economy. However, the final implementation effect of industrial policy has always been the focus of academic debate, and how to optimize the macro-control of government departments is also a hot spot of academic exploration.

In this context, this paper uses the data of A-share non-financial listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2006 to 2017 to investigate the impact of industrial policy on the financialization of enterprises, taking China’s ten major industrial revitalization plans issued in 2009 as a natural experiment. The empirical results show that: Compared with the control group, the introduction of ten industrial revitalization plans significantly promotes the financial degree of non-financial enterprises. This shows that in order to promote the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure, industrial policy will also drive non-financial enterprises to participate in the financial market and become an important objective factor to intensify the financialization of enterprises. Based on the scale and ownership of enterprises, the results show that: After the introduction of the top ten industrial revitalization plans, the financial degree of large enterprises has been significantly improved, while that of small enterprises has not been significantly improved; similarly, the degree of financial melting of state-owned enterprises has also increased significantly after the introduction of the ten industrial revitalization plans, while non-state-owned enterprises still do not significant. Further research shows that: The introduction of the ten industrial revitalization planning policies has eased the financing constraints of non-financial enterprises in the experimental group. This shows that industrial policy affects the degree of enterprise financialization by changing the financing constraints of non-financial enterprises.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows: Through the empirical study on the implementation effect of the ten major industrial policies, it is found that industrial policy is one of the factors to improve the level of enterprise financialization. Therefore, the conclusions of this paper will help to explain the problem of “shifting from real to virtual” in China’s economic development from the perspective of government system, and expand the influencing factors of enterprise financialization, which has practical significance for further preventing and restraining the development of enterprise financialization.