Governance and has quite a large effect on corporate agency cost and market value. Recently, many economists and financial analysts have verified that it would be helpful for reducing corporate agency cost by means of improving managers’ shareholding ratio, debt/equity ratio and ownership concentration respectively.
Previous researches mostly analyzes the relationship between capital structure and corporate performance due to difficulties in measuring agency cost when they are doing empirical researches on this issue. It should also be noticed that ownership structure plays an important role in capital structure and related researches are more concentrated on relationship between ownership structure and corporate performance especially internal shareholding ratio and firm’s performance. Such literatures do exist which directly analyzes ownership structure and agency cost, for example Sung et al. (1994), free cash flow and inferior ownership ratio are used to measure agency cost in this paper, it draws a conclusion that issuing risk protective bond has much more positive effect than issuing non-risk protective bond on shareholder wealth. At the same time, because shareholder wealth has negative correlation with agency cost, it can be deduced that agency cost could be reduced by event risk provision and shareholder wealth would be added naturally. Ang et al (2000) figures out agency cost could be replaced by administrative expenses rate ratio (administrative expense /turnover) and assets activity ratio (turnover/total asset). It suggests that agency cost will arise when there is only external managers but not internal managers; shareholding ratio has negative correlation with agency cost; numbers of non-managerial shareholder has positive correlation with agency cost; agency cost will go down under effective supervision of banks. Singh and Davidson (2003) select huge companies data as sample to do similar research. More over, Anderson et al.
(2003) begins to discuss how original race ownership would affect debt agency cost and it figures out original race ownership are quite popular in huge public companies and it was helpful for allaying conflict between shareholders and creditors.
The common point of the above literatures is: optimal capital structure will improve the efficiency of corporate governance, alleviate contradictory between client and agent. It could also restrain moral hazard of agent, decrease agency cost and eventually increase firm value. However, they do all the researches are under complete competition market and rational investment hypothesis together with contract theory of capital structure. They believe all of the agency cost would be undertaken by agent (Arrow, 1986). Obviously, it is unreasonable, in fact, clients have to control moral hazard and related agency cost by themselves.
Such researches done by Chinese domestic researchers make use of administrative expense ratio and total asset turnover to estimate agency cost between shareholders and managers, which is used to analyze the effect on agency cost. Looking up Chinese domestic research outcome, we can summarize that the most frequently used indicators are administrative expense ratio and total asset turnover as the substitution of agency cost.
Song et al. (2005) found out agency cost had negative correlation with ownership concentration and had positive correlation with ownership balance. Zhang et al. (2005) believes that managers’ shareholding ratio had obviously negative correlation with ownership agency cost; state owned ratio and circulation ratio were strongly positive correlated with ownership agency cost; debt ratio and legal person share ratio and the first major shareholders did not have negative correlation. Characters of final controller does not influence firm’s agency cost positively but negatively according to Tang xue song and Zhou xiao su (2005). In Ge bang liang and Jiang mei fang
(2010)’s paper, the authors figure out ownership concentration have nothing with agency cost but positively correlated with total asset turnover, fixed leverage ratio are negatively correlated with total asset turnover but capital structure are positively correlated with administrative expenses rate.
Based on the above Chinese domestic research conclusions we can find out, due to restrictive data and difficulties in determining agency cost, they are divided into 2 categories: firstly, they adopt traditional research methodology starting from current situation of Chinese listed companies capital structure on the basis of contract theory to deduce the effect on agency cost and propose relative countermeasures (Zhu ye, 2003). The other kind of researchers mainly make use of modern empirical methodology to indirectly judge how capital structure affects agency cost by means of testing firm’s performance.
Many financial indicators have already been used to discuss such issue, such as ownership structure, board features. They partially explained the effect on agency cost and many empirical researches seldomly used panel data which could probably fully evaluate firm’s agency cost. This paper tries to adopt 2 long term solvency indicators to reflect capital structure and 2 variables to estimate agency cost. Panel data is also used to analyze the relationship between them, hopefully, it could provide feasible suggestion to Chinese listed companies of optimizing corporate governance.
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