• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.41-53
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• 2019

Building a target capital structure is one of the most important decisions in corporate financial management. The purpose of this article is to identify the determinants of capital structure and adjustment mechanism toward the target leverage. The partial adjustment model was applied on a sample of 306 non-financial companies listed on Vietnam stock exchange market during the period of 2008-2017. By the fixed effect model estimation method, the research results have discovered the factors of growth opportunities, firm size, tangible fixed assets and firm's unique characteristics have a positive effect on the target capital structure of enterprises. Besides, profitability and dividend payment have a negative effect on the target capital structure of enterprises. Accordingly, the research results show that the average adjustment speed toward target leverage of the firms is 90.03%. Research results also demonstrate firms have higher or lower debt ratio than the target debt ratio, capital surplus or capital deficit also have an impact on the adjustment rate toward the target capital structure. The research results are consistent with the Dynamic Trade-off Theory. From this result, this article has provided policy implications for non-financial companies listed on Vietnam's stock market in building a reasonable target capital structure according to operating timeline to maximize enterprise value.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.258-265
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• 2003

In our study, we extracted the market, finance, and government factors determining R&D investment of individual firms in the IT industry in Korea. We collected the financial data of 515 individual firms belonging to IT and non-IT industries between 1980 and 1999 from the Korea Investors Service's database and investigated the empirical relationship between the factors using an ordinary regression model, a fixed effects model, and a random effects model. The main findings of our study are as follows: i) The Herfindahl Index variable representing the degree of market concentration is statistically insignificant in explaining R&D expenditures in the IT manufacturing industry. ii) Assets, which is used as a proxy variable for firm size, have a positive and statistically significant coefficient. These two results suggest that the Schumpeterian Hypothesis may be only partially applied to the IT manufacturing industry in Korea. iii) The dividend variable has a negative value and is statistically significant, indicating that a tendency of high dividends can restrict the internal cash flow for R&D investment. iv) The sales variable representing growth potential shows a positive coefficient. v) The subsidy as a proxy variable for governmental R&D promotion policies is positively correlated with R&D expenditure. This suggests that government policy has played a significant role in promoting R&D activities of IT firms in Korea since 1980. vi) Using a dummy variable, we verified that firms reduced their R&D investments to secure sufficient liquidity under the restructuring pressure during Korea's 1998 and 1999 economic crisis.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Studies
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.233-265
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• 1996

We examine the impact of public and private information on price movements using the thirty DJIA stocks and twenty-one NASDAQ stocks. We find that the standard deviation of daily returns on information days (dividend announcement, earnings announcement, insider purchase, or insider sale) is much higher than on no-information days. Both public information matters at the NYSE, probably due to masked identification of insiders. Earnings announcement has the greatest impact for both DJIA and NASDAQ stocks, and there is some evidence of positive impact of insider asle on return volatility of NASDAQ stocks. There has been considerable debate, e.g., French and Roll (1986), over whether market volatility is due to public information or private information-the latter gathered through costly search and only revealed through trading. Public information is composed of (1) marketwide public information such as regularly scheduled federal economic announcements (e.g., employment, GNP, leading indicators) and (2) company-specific public information such as dividend and earnings announcements. Policy makers and corporate insiders have a better access to marketwide private information (e.g., a new monetary policy decision made in the Federal Reserve Board meeting) and company-specific private information, respectively, compated to the general public. Ederington and Lee (1993) show that marketwide public information accounts for most of the observed volatility patterns in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets. Company-specific public information is explored by Patell and Wolfson (1984) and Jennings and Starks (1985). They show that dividend and earnings announcements induce higher than normal volatility in equity prices. Kyle (1985), Admati and Pfleiderer (1988), Barclay, Litzenberger and Warner (1990), Foster and Viswanathan (1990), Back (1992), and Barclay and Warner (1993) show that the private information help by informed traders and revealed through trading influences market volatility. Cornell and Sirri (1992)' and Meulbroek (1992) investigate the actual insider trading activities in a tender offer case and the prosecuted illegal trading cased, respectively. This paper examines the aggregate and individual impact of marketwide information, company-specific public information, and company-specific private information on equity prices. Specifically, we use the thirty common stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and twenty one National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) common stocks to examine how their prices react to information. Marketwide information (public and private) is estimated by the movement in the Standard and Poors (S & P) 500 Index price for the DJIA stocks and the movement in the NASDAQ Composite Index price for the NASDAQ stocks. Divedend and earnings announcements are used as a subset of company-specific public information. The trading activity of corporate insiders (major corporate officers, members of the board of directors, and owners of at least 10 percent of any equity class) with an access to private information can be cannot legally trade on private information. Therefore, most insider transactions are not necessarily based on private information. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that market participants observe how insiders trade in order to infer any information that they cannot possess because insiders tend to buy (sell) when they have good (bad) information about their company. For example, Damodaran and Liu (1993) show that insiders of real estate investment trusts buy (sell) after they receive favorable (unfavorable) appraisal news before the information in these appraisals is released to the public. Price discovery in a competitive multiple-dealership market (NASDAQ) would be different from that in a monopolistic specialist system (NYSE). Consequently, we hypothesize that NASDAQ stocks are affected more by private information (or more precisely, insider trading) than the DJIA stocks. In the next section, we describe our choices of the fifty-one stocks and the public and private information set. We also discuss institutional differences between the NYSE and the NASDAQ market. In Section II, we examine the implications of public and private information for the volatility of daily returns of each stock. In Section III, we turn to the question of the relative importance of individual elements of our information set. Further analysis of the five DJIA stocks and the four NASDAQ stocks that are most sensitive to earnings announcements is given in Section IV, and our results are summarized in Section V.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.131-177
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• 2006

This paper examines a simultaneous determination of corporate control mechanisms, and its effects on firm performance. The corporate control mechanisms considered include the following; insider shareholding, institutional shareholding, the board of directors, dividend policy, and capital structure. This paper applies a simultaneous equation methodology and investigates the interdependence among the corporate control mechanisms. In the first part, the paper finds that firm-level variations of control mechanisms are large across time although average variations are relatively small. These variations are related to one another, which is confirmed by Granger causality test based on dynamic panel autoregression model. More specifically insider shareholding, institutional shareholding and outside director ratio cause each other. With regard to interdependence among the control mechanisms, 2SLS(two stage least squares) regression results show that insider shareholding and institutional shareholding are substitutes while institutional shareholding acts as complements to the ratio of outside members in the board of directors. Then in the second part, the paper examines the relationship between firm performance and corporate governance. Firm performance, measured by Tobin's Q, has a positive association with leverage ratio while that has a negative relation to outside director ratio. This suggests that there may be a room for reforming corporate governance in Korea. Specifically it is necessary to enhance the independence of the outside directors.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.163-174
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• 2017

This study analyzed how Korean firms' recapitalization affects their capital structure decision and firm value. Recapitalization was categorized into three groups according to the influence of the debt to equity ratio: debt ratio-increasing-recapitalization(capital reduction with refund, cash dividend), debt ratio-unchanging-recapitalization (capital reduction without refund, retirement of repurchased stocks), and debt ratio-decreasing-recapitalization(exercise the rights for convertible bonds, bond with stock warrants, exchangeable bonds and stock options). This article highlights how the relationship between the firms' recapitalization and the capital structure decision driven by the change in debt to equity ratio through the recapitalization should affect the firm value. The whole recapitalization sample used for this analysis comprised 22,814 enterprises listed on the Korea Exchange that were analyzed over the 16-year period from 2000 to 2015. To summarize the results of this Panel Data Analysis, firstly, when a firm executes debt ratio-increasing-recapitalization and debt ratio-decreasing-recapitalization at the period of t-1, the debt to equity ratio, which is increased or decreased, should affect the firm's debt capacity in the same period, then, at the period of t, the firm establishes a leverage policy to readjust the debt to equity ratio the other way around. These adjustments of debt-paying-ability from the leverage policy, including the capital structure decision, finally affect the firm value. Secondly, when a firm implements the debt ratio-unchanging-recapitalization in the period of t-1, the debt to equity ratio, which is neutral, should not affect the firm's capital structure decision. But, the firm value is positively affected by the influence of that recapitalization. Conclusively, we acknowledge a firm which carries out the recapitalization balances its capital structure to the optimal level of leverage and that the capital structure decision positively affects the corporate value.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.147-181
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• 2007

Our article investigates the risk implication of ownership structure in life insurance companies. We set up a model to identify the priority structure of policyholder's and shareholder's cashflow claims, and to derive its implications. Current literature on this issue has focused on the agency paradigm or the risk-sharing efficiency. Fama and Jensen(1983a, 1983b) and Mayers and Smith(1981, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1994) argue that the survival of both the corporate and the mutual form of organization is due in part to the relative efficiencies in controlling agency problems. With regard to insurance business, agency problems arise because of the three functions inherent in the organizations:manager, risk-bearer(owner), and policyholder. Stock insurers are characterized by the potentially complete separation of all three functions while mutual insurers merger the policyholder with the ownership function. Doherty and Dionne(1993) and Doherty(1991) concentrate their analysis on differences in the efficiency of risk sharing between participating and non-participating policies. They argue that when the undiversifiable risk has higher portion in business risk, combining policy and equity claims into a single package is a more efficient risk-sharing contract than a simple prepaid risk-transfer. Among various methods for assembling the policy/equity package, Doherty and Dionne(1993) and Doherty(1991) suggest that policy/equity package offered by the mutual is the most efficient risk-sharing arrangement. There has been a controversy on the property of participating policies sold by life insurance corporations in Korea. Some scholars argue that participating policyholders of Korean life insurance companies have shared the cashflow risk with shareholders. They emphasize that insurance firms have used dividend reserves to supplement for equity deficits. Thus, they argue that the economic entities of Korean life insurance companies are mutual companies though their legal entities are corporations. Our article explicitly sets up each stakeholder's cashflow claim in stock and mutual insurers, and thus identify risk differences in shareholder and policyholder. Using our model, we could derive direct implications on the controversy. Our model shows that life insurance companies would sell participating policies since policyholders would have the incentive to share the risk inherent in their primary claims with equityholders. And there exists a fundamental difference in shareholder's risk and equityholder's.