资本结构股权结构与公司绩效.pdf

Capital Structure and Firm Performance 1. Introduction Agency costs represent important problems in corporate governance in both financial and nonfinancial industries. The separation of ownership and control in a professionally 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, 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 mitigate 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 in 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 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 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 investment (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., 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, al