情報不均衡이 韓國企業의 財務構造에 미치는 影響에 관한 硏究 = A Study on the Impact of Information Asymmetry on the Financial Structure of Korean Manufacturing Firms

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the field of corporate finance, much effort has been directed to find the determinants of firms' financial structure through theoretical and empirical works. Recently, Myers and Majluf(1984) argued that if there is information asymmetry between managements and outside investors about the true value of the firm, the cost of new stock issue is very high, and the firm rely interval fund before everything in financing. Myers(1984) called this explanation as the "pecking order theory". So, the more profitable a firm is, the less the firm use outside debt, and this prediction is against the well-known "static tradeoff theory". The hypohesis that profitability is negatively related to debt ratio has been tested and confirmed in many empirical works, such as Kester(1986) and Baskin(1989).
By the way, although profitability, the proxy of internal financing, has a negative impact on debt ratio, the magnitude of regression coefficients should be different by the firms' characteristics. However, there has been no research in such direction to our knowledge. In the studies of finding the role of cash flow variable in corporate real investments, Fazzari et al. (1988) and Hoshi et al. (1991) have already demonstrated that the magnitude is different according to the form' characteristics such as divided payout ratio of member of keiretsu(the Japanese group of firms) .
In Korea, most observers believe that the firms belong to Jaebul (the group of firms formed by mutual shockholdings) are less confronted with financing constraints due to information asymmetry than in the case of independent firms. Moreover the Jaebul firms have more power to overcome outside financing constraints by way of providing collaterals or mutual guarantees and direct ownership of financial institutions. Therefore, the Jaebul firms are at advantage over bank borrowing and bond issue than for independent firms . And we can conjeture that independent firm' debt ratio will be more sensitive to the change of profitability.
In this paper, the total sample is consisted of 356 Korean manufacturing firms for the periods 1987-90. Out of which Jaebul firms are 83 and independent firms are 273, listed firms are 153(42 Jaebul firms and 111 independent firms) and unlisted forms are 203(41 Jaebul firms and 162 independent firms). Regressions are run for the total sample and the subsample. Dependent variable is debt ratio defined as total debt/total asset in book value. Profitability is defined as operating income/total asset. To control other effects, we include some important proxy variables which represent firm size, collateral value, type of investment opportunity growth, non-debt tax shield.
The major findings can be summarized as follows; (1) The profitability has a negative impact on the debt ratios and the statistical significance is very strong. This result is consistent with Jaebul firms as well as independent firms. (2) The magnitude of negative impact is larger for Jaebul films than for independent firms as we conjecture, and the difference of regression coefficients between Jaebul and independent firms is most pronounced in the unlisted firm sample. This findings confirm our expectation that unlisted independent firms are most severely constrained in outside financing and therefore depend on internal fund heavily. (3) Unlisted firms are more affected by profitability than listed firms. This result is also reflect the fact that unlisted firms are at disadvantage to overcome information asymmetry and in outside financing

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 序論
• Ⅱ. 關聯理論 및 實證硏究의 檢討
• 1. 關聯理論 및 財務構造決定要因
• 2. 旣存의 實證硏究
• Ⅲ. 財閥企業과 單獨企業의 財務資料를 이용한 分析
• 1. 財閥企業과 單獨企業의 財務環境 分析
• 2. 假設의 設定
• 3. 分析對象企業 및 變數
• 4. 分析方法 및 結果
• Ⅳ. 要約 및 結論