Abstract: The re-lending business among non-financial enterprises which exists outside the banking supervision system constitutes an important part of Chinese-style shadow banking activities and has received widespread attention from regulators and academia. Based on the sample of Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2015 provided by the Standard & Poor's Compustat Global database, this paper constructs the metrics of China's non-financial corporate shadow banking activities. Based on the perspective of "structural hole", this paper starts from the information superiority contained in the supply chain relationship of enterprises. The empirical test examines the impact of information superiority on the scale of shadow banking business of non-financial companies. The research in this paper finds that the more information the enterprise has on the upstream and downstream enterprises, the larger the scale of the shadow banking business. Our further research finds that the positive correlation between shadow banking and information superiority is more obvious in enterprises with political connection and earnings management; in the enterprises with high degree of marketization, this positive correlation is weakened. The results show that in the institutional environment of information asymmetry and credit constraint in China, supply chain relationship can transmit more extensive and richer company trait information to enterprises, so that enterprises can gain information advantage and increase shadow banking business. The paper also finds that the results are still robust after using the surrogate indicators of shadow banking, information superiority and testing endogeneity. The research in this paper not only theoretically supplies the literature on the causes of shadow banking business and information acquisition, but also has important policy significance for current shadow banking supervision and supply chain management.

Key words: shadow banking, supply chain relationship, information superiority