Corporate Financialization and Agricultural Supply Chain Resilience: Evidence from Agricultural Listed Companies

Against the backdrop of heightened global economic uncertainty and increasingly frequent risks in agricultural supply chains, enhancing agricultural supply chain resilience has become a critical issue for safeguarding national food security and promoting high-quality agricultural development. As key actors within agricultural supply chains, the impact of financialization—defined as the shift of resources to non-core financial assets—among agricultural listed firms on supply chain resilience warrants systematic examination. Using panel data from 165 Chinese agricultural listed firms (2010–2022), this study empirically investigates the impact of corporate financialization on agricultural supply chain resilience and its underlying mechanisms. An entropy-weighted composite index based on 16 parameters is used to assess agricultural supply chain resilience. It is composed of three dimensions: resistance capability, recovery capacity, and renewal capacity. The results show that: Financialization significantly undermines supply chain resilience, with the most substantial negative effect on recovery capacity, followed by renewal capacity, and the weakest on resistance capacity. Heterogeneity analyses show more pronounced negative effects among non-state-owned enterprises, non-primary sector firms, and capital-intensive enterprises. Financing constraints and capital expenditures partially mediate the negative relationship between financialization and resilience, while profitability persistence exacerbates the crowding-out effect. These findings suggest that policymakers should strike a compromise between reducing excessive financialization and strengthening agricultural supply chains. While prudently guiding agricultural firms’ financial asset allocation, greater emphasis should be placed on developing a diverse and coordinated industrial support system, thereby diverting financial capital away from crowding out core operations and toward effectively serving the real economy, ultimately contributing to national food security and agricultural modernization.