indicates that the implicitly government-guaranteed debt in China is risk-free. In other words, bankrupt state-owned enterprises (SOEs)might be unsaleable, and at some point the government will use budgetary funds to finance their non-performing loans. Since public utilities are supported by government, the supplier will not worry about the possible default risk, so the supplier is willing to provide more accounts receivable to public utilities during the financial crisis. On the contrary, the private companies have a higher default risk, therefore, they obtain less accounts payable from their suppliers during the financial crisis. This leads to the following hypothesis: