Abstract: With the evolution of economic and financial reform, the business types of commercial banks are becoming more and more abundant, and the non-interest business development has become an important direction to commercial banks. From the perspective of soft budget constraints, this paper conducts a theoretical analysis of the internal mechanism of state-owned equity ownership structure affecting commercial banks’ non-interest business development through bankers’ talent allocation, resurrection of the gambling behavior and creative destruction effect under the theoretical guidance of equity ownership structure affecting the business behavior and performance of companies. Then taking the panel data of 14 listed commercial banks in China from 2007 to 2016 as the samples, it carries out an empirical analysis and robust test on the theoretical hypothesis with the method of static penal data. The findings of the empirical study show that the higher the proportion of state-owned shareholding is, the more lagging behind the commercial banks’ non-interest business development will be. While the commercial banks with lower proportion of state-owned shareholding would have a better development of their non-interest business. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the non-interest business development of China’s commercial banks from the two aspects, i.e., stock revitalization and incremental reform.

Key words: commercial banks; equity ownership structure; soft budget constraints; non-interest business development; panel data model