서강대학교

초록/요약

The issues on capital structure have been analyzed within the boundaries of the relationship with shareholders, bondholders and managers. Fama and Jensen (1983) expanded the idea of the contractual relationships into explicit and implicit contracts. Cornel and Shapiro (1987) introduced the stakeholder approach in finance and suggest that implicit claims can affect capital structure. These studies make our research go beyond the relationship of explicit contracts in capital structure and further to the relationship of implicit contractual stakeholders of suppliers, customers and employees. Thus, this dissertation addresses the question “How can the implicit contractual relationship with suppliers, customers and employees affect firm's leverage?". The proxy variable for the degree of dependability of implicit contracts with suppliers and customers is the intensity of R&D expenditure undertaken by suppliers and customers. Maksimovic and Titman (1991) argued that suppliers and customers undertaking relation specific investment may be unwilling to do business with highly leveraged firms for its reputation and high quality products. Allen and Phillips (2000) explained that relationship-specific investments are likely to be created in R&D intensive industries. Thus, the two components between implicit contract and capital structure set the first hypothesis-"The higher the R&D intensity of a firm's suppliers and customers, the lower the firm's leverage". The empirical result from fixed panel model finds that there is a negative relation between market value leverage and supplier/customer's R&D expenditure at statistically significant level and thus supports the hypothesis. The negative relation seen in the GMM model as robustness test also strengthen the hypothesis. The R&D expenditure data of suppliers and customers are used on industry level in the input-output table and the data are selected during the 10 years from 1999 to 2008 downloaded from the listed company association data base (TS2000). The proxy variable for the degree of dependability of implicit contracts with suppliers and employees is the fixed payoff ratio, which is computed by dividing the fixed payoff contracts to suppliers and employees by the total payment. Fama (1990) argues that a higher fraction of fixed payoff to supplier and employee implies high default risk and higher contract costs. To control high default risk and minimize contract costs, he argues that firms should issue less debt and more equity. Thus, these arguments allow setting the second hypothesis-"The higher the fraction of fixed payoff contracts to suppliers and employees, the lower the debt in the capital structure". The empirical result finds that there is a negative relation between market value leverage and the fixed payoff contracts to suppliers and employees at the statistically significant level and thus supports the hypothesis. This empirical analysis is closely related with the works of Yi Jae-Sun (2003) and Kale and Shahrur (2007). However, our empirical analysis consolidates the research in the name of implicit contracts and uses the fixed effect panel model with Korean data. This dissertation shows that implicit contracting is important in the capital structure decision as much as explicit contracting, as basic approach to this area in Korea.