Abstract: Private enterprises in China' s high-tech industries are generally faced with external financing constraints. Considering the prominent role of such enterprises in promoting the construction of innovative country, we attach great importance on how to ease their financing restraints. This paper regards state ownership as a non-market strategy and patent application as a market strategy for private enterprises to obtain debt financing, and studies what effect each of the two strategies has on the availability of debt financing. What' s more, we explore the potential effect of using the two strategies in a mixed way to find a better solution for private enterprises to break through financing bottleneck. The two-way fixed effects regression analyses based on the panel data of 438 private enterprises in high-tech manufacturing industries from 2007 to 2016 reach the following conclusions. The introduction of state ownership, as a non-market strategy, has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the debt financing availability. Patent application that releases market signal, as a market strategy, helps private enterprises to obtain debt financing. At the same time, this paper integrates these two types of strategies and finds that the introduction of state ownership reduces the intensity of patent signal but enhances the effect of patent signal on debt financing availability.

Key words: debt financing, state ownership, patent signal, high-tech industries, private enterprises