外文翻譯--資本結(jié)構(gòu)與企業(yè)績(jī)效

1、1Capital Structure and Firm Performance1. IntroductionAgency costs represent important problems in corporate governance in both financial and nonfinancial industries. The separation of ownership and control in a professi

2、onally managed firm may result in managers exerting insufficient work effort, indulging in perquisites, choosing inputs or outputs that suit their own preferences, or otherwise failing to maximize firm value. In effect,

3、the agency costs of outside ownership equal the lost value from professional managers maximizing their own utility, rather than the value of the firm. Theory suggests that the choice of capital structure may help mitigat

4、e these agency costs. Under the agency costs hypothesis, high leverage or a low equity/asset ratio reduces the agency costs of outside equity and increases firm value by constraining or encouraging managers to act more i

5、n the interests of shareholders. Since the seminal paper by Jensen and Meckling (1976), a vast literature on such agency-theoretic explanations of capital structure has developed (see Harris and Raviv 1991 and Myers 2001

6、 for reviews). Greater financial leverage may affect managers and reduce agency costs through the threat of liquidation, which causes personal losses to managers of salaries, reputation, perquisites, etc. (e.g., Grossman

7、 and Hart 1982, Williams 1987), and through pressure to generate cash flow to pay interest expenses (e.g., Jensen 1986). Higher leverage can mitigate conflicts between shareholders and managers concerning the choice of i

8、nvestment (e.g., Myers 1977), the amount of risk to undertake (e.g., Jensen and Meckling 1976, Williams 1987), the conditions under which the firm is liquidated (e.g., Harris and Raviv 1990), and dividend policy (e.g.,

9、Stulz 1990).A testable prediction of this class of models is that increasing the leverage ratio should result in lower agency costs of outside equity and improved firm performance, all else held equal. However, when leve

10、rage becomes relatively high, further increases generate significant agency costs of outside debt – including higher expected costs of bankruptcy or financial distress – arising from conflicts between bondholders and sha

11、reholders.1 Because it is difficult to distinguish empirically between the two sources of agency costs, we follow the literature and allow the relationship between total agency costs and leverage to be nonmonotonic.Despi

12、te the importance of this theory, there is at best mixed empirical evidence in the extant literature (see Harris and Raviv 1991, Titman 2000, and Myers 2001 for reviews). Tests of the agency costs hypothesis typically re

13、gress measures of firm performance on the equity capital ratio or other indicator of leverage plus some control variables. At least three problems appear in the prior studies that we address in our application. In the ca

14、se of the banking industry studied here, there are also regulatory 3the firm’s profit efficiency and other variables is used to test the net effects of the efficiency-risk and franchise-value hypotheses. Both equations a

15、re econometrically identified through exclusion restrictions that are consistent with the theories.Third, some, but not all of the prior studies did not take ownership structure into account. Under virtually any theory o

16、f agency costs, ownership structure is important, since it is the separation of ownership and control that creates agency costs (e.g., Barnea, Haugen, and Senbet 1985). Greater insider shares may reduce agency costs, alt

17、hough the effect may be reversed at very high levels of insider holdings (e.g., Morck, Shleifer, and Vishny 1988). As well, outside block ownership or institutional holdings tend to mitigate agency costs by creating a re

18、latively efficient monitor of the managers (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny 1986). Exclusion of the ownership variables may bias the test results because the ownership variables may be correlated with the dependent variable in

19、 the agency cost equation (performance) and with the key exogenous variable (leverage) through the reverse causality hypotheses noted aboveTo address this third problem, we include ownership structure variables in the ag

20、ency cost equation explaining profit efficiency. We include insider ownership, outside block holdings, and institutional holdings.Our application to data from the banking industry is advantageous because of the abundance

21、 of quality data available on firms in this industry. In particular, we have detailed financial data for a large number of firms producing comparable products with similar technologies, and information on market prices a

22、nd other exogenous conditions in the local markets in which they operate. In addition, some studies in this literature find evidence of the link between the efficiency of firms and variables that are recognized to affect

23、 agency costs, including leverage and ownership structure (see Berger and Mester 1997 for a review).Although banking is a regulated industry, banks are subject to the same type of agency costs and other influences on beh

24、avior as other industries. The banks in the sample are subject to essentially equal regulatory constraints, and we focus on differences across banks, not between banks and other firms. Most banks are well above the regul

25、atory capital minimums, and our results are based primarily on differences at the mar2. Theories of reverse causality from performance to capital structureAs noted, prior research on agency costs generally does not take

26、into account the possibility of reverse causation from performance to capital structure, which may result in simultaneous-equations bias. We offer two hypotheses of reverse causation based on violations of the Modigliani