Capital structure and institutional setting: a decompositional and international analysis

The legal and institutional setting is more and more influential in firms’ financial decisions. Our article analyses firms’ capital structure in an international framework in order to assess the different level of debt use across countries and to identify both common and differential explanatory factors. Although the level of financial leverage is quite different, the factors that have traditionally driven capital structure decisions have much in common in all the legal and institutional settings. The performance and size of the firm, the assets tangibility and the growth opportunities have a relevant but differential effect across the different institutional systems. Consequently, our results suggest that the legal and institutional system of each country does not only affect firms’ capital structure but also creates the conditions to explain a differential effect of the common determinants of firms’ financial choices.     

The asymmetric relationship between executive earnings management and compensation: a panel threshold regression approach

Prior research shows that chief executive officers (CEOs) are rewarded for their earnings management. We re-examine this issue using a panel threshold regression approach, which allows the effect of earnings management on the CEO compensation to change across the level of earnings management and CEO compensation. Our results show that the effect of CEOs’ discretionary accounting choices on their compensation is not homogeneous across various degrees of earnings management and compensation. In particular, for firms with moderate (inordinate) levels of earnings management and CEO compensation, earnings management is rewarded (penalized).     

Earnings response coefficient in the MENA region

This article documents the earnings response coefficient (ERC) for nonfinancial firms listed in the Middle East and North Africa region during the period between 2003 and 2013. Our results show significantly positive ERC for our sample firms. The results are robust across different countries and different industries. Our results also show that ERC increases with increasing the measurement interval. It indicates that more information is incorporated in prices as the measurement interval increase. Consequently, we argue that significance of reported earnings is higher for long-term investors in the MENA region.     

The impact of convertible debt financing on investment timing

We develop a model to examine the timing of investment decisions in relation to the issuance of convertible debt by firms. Our model shows that when the demand shock has higher volatility, the firm finances the investment cost with high-coupon convertible debt. We find that default occurs earlier for firms that finance with convertible debt rather than with straight debt. We also find that firms with high-growth prospection, high volatility, and low capital costs that issue convertible debt tend to defer investments. Furthermore, we examine the investment decisions in which the convertible debt includes a call provision. We show that firms that use callable convertible debt invest earlier than those that use non-callable convertible debt by using suboptimal coupon payments. The opportunity from the forced conversion increases as the volatility increases. These results are consistent with recent empirical evidence.     

The capital structure and investment of regulated firms under alternative regulatory regimes

This paper explains how regulated firms choose their capital structure and examines the effects of this choice on investment and on regulated prices. It is shown that in equilibrium, firms have an optimal debt level and that given this debt level, the regulated price is set high enough to ensure that firms never become financially distressed. The analysis of the equilibrium yields testable hypotheses concerning the effects of changes in cost parameters and in the regulatory climate on the equilibrium investment level, capital structure, and regulated price. The analysis also shows that a regulatory restriction on the ability of the firm to issue securities may have an adverse effect on investment and consequently may harm consumers.     

高科技企业R&D支出资本化的动机研究

文章以2007-2009年在深圳交易所上市的高科技企业为样本,实证研究了R&D支出资本化动机的影响因素。研究结果表明,高科技企业R&D支出资本化的比例受到债务契约和资本市场动机的影响,企业的财务杠杆越高,越倾向于把R&D支出进行资本化处理;在经营状况不好时,企业为保持上市资格、扭亏为盈而趋于把R&D支出进行资本化处理。薪酬契约和收益平滑尚不能很好地解释R&D支出资本化的选择动机。     

Ownership Structure and Capital Structure: A Study of Vietnamese Listed Firms

This paper examines the relationships between ownership structure and capital structure for non‐financial listed firms in Vietnam during the period 2007–2012. Although different approaches are applied in this research, all results from those models are consistent. The study finds that while foreign ownership has a negative impact on leverage, state ownership has a positive influence. Managerial ownership has a positive relation with debt level, while the effect of large ownership on debt level is not conclusive.     

Determinants of Leverage in Slovenian Blue-Chip Firms and Stock Performance Following Substantial Debt Increases

Hypotheses concerning capital structures are some of the most frequently tested in the financial literature. Authors usually discuss different incentives for the use of leverage. Their views can be broadly classified in two main groups. The proponents of the first argue that leverage increases the cash flow available to investors. With the use of debt a firm gains because it uses a cheaper component of capital and since it pays less tax thanks to advantageous debt tax shields. On the other hand, the proponents of the second group stress the importance of minimising transaction costs, and information asymmetry. They point to a pecking order of finance sources. In this article, I explain the most frequently stated drivers that provide incentives for the more extensive use of debt with a focus on an emerging market environment and test whether they are relevant to Slovenian blue-chip firms that emerged from the transition of the last decade.

The second part introduces the owners' point of view. I test whether raised debt levels in fact improve the long-term return to the stockholders of Slovenian firms. This should be expected because of the institution-led capital structure conservatism that firms practised in the past. Three methods are employed to test the relationship between increased levels of debt and long-term stock return. All of them offer a similar conclusion that the expected long-term performance of firms which significantly increased their leverage is no better than the long-term performance of firms that did not. The results are useful for other emerging capital markets in Europe where firms and investors faced similar circumstances tied to their socialist past and transition process.     

Employee Profit-sharing and Labor Extraction in a Classical Model of Distribution and Growth

This article sets out a classical model of economic growth in which the distribution of income features the possibility of profit-sharing with workers, as firms choose periodically between two labor-extraction compensation strategies. Workers are homogeneous with regard to labor power, and firms choose to compensate them with either only a conventional wage or a share of profits on top of this conventional wage. Empirical evidence shows that labor productivity (i.e. labor extraction) in profit-sharing firms is higher than labor productivity in non-sharing firms. The frequency distribution of labor-extraction employee compensation strategies and labor productivity across firms is time-variant, being driven by satisficing imitation dynamics from which we derive two significant results. First, heterogeneity in labor-extraction compensation strategies across firms, and hence earnings inequality across workers can be a stable long-run equilibrium outcome. Second, although convergence to a long-run equilibrium may occur with either a falling or increasing proportion of profit-sharing firms, the share of net profits in income and the rates of net profit, capital accumulation and economic growth nevertheless all converge to the highest possible long-run equilibrium values.     

Banking solvency determinants in the EU: a model based on stress tests

Using a multilevel regression model, this article aims to find determinants of banking solvency in the European Union. The endogenous variable is defined as the capital ratio determined by stress tests. Both internal (financial ratios and sovereign debt exposures) and external (macroeconomic indicators) variables are proposed as covariates. The results reveal that capitalization, earnings, assets structure and exposure to PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) sovereign debt are significant among the former, and economic growth, interest and exchange rates, and real estate prices among the latter.     

Taxation and Capital Structure Choice: The Role of Ownership

Applying firm fixed‐effects estimations to European firm‐level data, I analyze how ownership structure affects the relationship between taxation and capital structure. I find that an increase in the corporate tax rate affects the debt‐to‐assets ratio positively, and that this effect is stronger for firms with concentrated ownership. These results hold independently of whether firms are standalone or subsidiaries, and are also valid if subsidiaries are divided into those that are foreign‐owned and those domestically owned. Lastly, ownership plays a role even when controlling for other potentially important determinants of the relation between corporate taxation and capital structure.     

Debt markets and corporate debt structure in an emerging market: The South African example

This is a first attempt at gauging the effects of corporate public debt issuance on the debt structure, risk profile and valuation of firms in an emerging market. We find that financial services firms, along with government institutions, are important early supporters of an organized public debt market. Firms in this market use equity, public debt and private debt funds simultaneously as need be. Consistent with predictions of the corporate debt structure literature, public debt-issuing firms are larger, older, more profitable, and less informational opaque than non-public debt-issuing firms. Moreover, public debt-issuing firms experience significant reductions in both overall and systematic risks, and incur lower cost of capital following issuance than non-public debt issuers. These and other findings of the study suggest deepening national debt markets can be a fruitful financial market development exercise for emerging markets.     

Some reflections on technical progress in financing small firms ∗

Starting from a comparison of Josef Steindl's observations on the problems of the financing of small firms, with the implications of the Modigiani – Miller approach to financial structure, this paper investigates relationships between financial leverage and operating leverage by the application of option pricing theory to the value of a firm's debt. Drawing on possible differences between the second-hand break-up value and the present value of the flow of earnings from a firm's assets, it suggests linkages between production structure and firm financial structure. It then extends these results to resolving the problems of providing market financing for the creation and evolution of small firms in industrialized and transforming economies.     

The effect of debt capacity on the long-term stock returns of debt-free firms

This article examines the long-term stock market performance of debt-free firms with high and low levels of debt capacity to see whether they are different. We use Fama and French’s (1993) three-factor and Carhart’s (1997) four-factor models to examine the subsequent 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5-year stock returns of firms that stayed debt free for 3- and 5-year periods. We measure debt capacity as the expected asset liquidation value of a firm, which is proxied by the firm-level tangibility measure defined by Berger, Ofek, and Swary (1996). We find that regardless of the level of debt capacity, zero-debt firms generate positive abnormal returns in the long run after controlling for key risk factors. We also find support for the notion that preserving debt capacity in the form of higher tangibility reinforces the positive abnormal returns over and above the effect of a zero-leverage policy.     

When is FDI a capital flow?

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which a foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a net capital flow across countries. For this purpose, we investigate how multinational firms finance their foreign affiliates, globally or locally. We develop a contract theoretical model in which the financing structure is used to govern the incentives of managers. We find that the investment tends to be financed locally if managerial incentive problems are large. Thus, microeconomic governance problems may have macroeconomic implications for the net capital flow to host countries. Our results are consistent with survey data on German and Austrian investment flows of firms to Eastern Europe.     

Capital structure in South Korea: a quantile regression approach

Knowledge of how South Korean firms choose their capital structures has particular value due to the country's specific corporate structure and the role of leverage in the evolution of its financial crisis of 1997 and recovery. Using a large panel for the years 1992–2001, we investigate the evolution and determinants of Korean firms' capital structure and focus on differences between firms in different quantiles of the debt–capital distribution. Conditional quantile regressions show that while variables associated with standard models of asymmetric information costs are significant throughout the distribution, there are considerable differences, including differences in sign, in their impact on firms with different degrees of leverage. Those observed nonlinearities in the determinants of capital structure are consistent with a model of capital structure that includes both costs resulting from asymmetric information and an upper bound on the debt–capital ratio.     

Financial crises,debt overhang,and firm growth in transition economies

ABSTRACT

We examine the effects of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the European debt crisis of 2011 on the relationship between capital structure, investments, and performance for Eastern European companies. While the existing literature documents how firms’ investments are sensitive to the availability of internal funds and to debt holdings, we further investigate whether this investment sensitivity also translates in different levels of performance, and document that capital structure indeed has both a direct and an indirect effect, mediated by the capital expenditure channel. We show that firms with higher financial flexibility experience higher investments and returns on capital. Over-levered firms instead suffer from a debt overhang condition, forcing them to curb investments, and consequently experiencing lower performance. Overall, we provide evidence on the importance of capital structure and financial flexibility on investments and performance, showing the real consequences of the debt overhang condition on firm value creation. Firms should therefore aim at maintaining adequate financial flexibility in order to be able to pursue future profitable investment opportunities, and avoid the under-investment problem arising from a debt overhang situation.     

Firm size and debt maturity as indirect determinants of capital structure: evidence form European panel data

The study aims at verifying whether the firm size and debt maturity affect the relationship between capital structure and its main determinants. Using panel data models, the impact of the primary factors on leverage is compared across three size groups of firms and for different measures of debt in order to identify the size effect and the debt maturity effect in these relationships. The study covers 11 EU countries during the period 2000–2013. Findings provide evidence that financing choices of small firms provide more support for the pecking-order theory, whereas medium and large-sized firms tend to follow the trade-off predictions on leverage. It also appears that the trade-off theory is more applicable for short-term debt, while pecking order – for long-term debt.     

Value Relevance of Earnings in an Emerging Capital Market: the Case of A-shares in China

This study investigates the value relevance of earnings in the emerging capital market of China by examining the information content of accounting earnings measured under the People's Republic of China Accounting Standards (PRC-GAAP). Based on the A-shares of listed Chinese firms during 1994–97, a significant association is observed between annual market-adjusted stock return and the change of earnings. Also documented is a significant price reaction to the annual earnings announcement in a three-day window centered around the announcement date. Overall, the empirical results suggest that earnings reported in China are value-relevant to A-share investors.     

REFORMING BANK CAPITAL REGULATION: USING SUBORDINATED DEBT TO ENHANCE MARKET AND SUPERVISORY DISCIPLINE

In 1988 the Basel Capital Accord introduced minimum risk-weighted capital requirements for internationally active banks. In recent years there has been a growing realization that there are significant problems with the capital guidelines. As financial firms have become more sophisticated and complex they have effectively arbitraged the requirements and have become so good at it that the regulations have essentially ceased being a safety and soundness issue for supervisors and have become more of a compliance issue. Indeed, the Basel Committee is now evaluating reforms to the capital accord and is considering various means to improve the risk-capital relationship and to increase the role of market discipline. The authors argue that many of the problems that currently exist can be addressed, and some additional benefits not previously possible under the current capital guidelines can be realized, by increasing the role of subordinated debt in the bank capital structure. The authors discuss the potential benefits and offer a capital reform proposal that would improve both market and supervisory oversight. This should lead to more prudent risk management behavior by the larger, more complex banking organizations, resulting in a safer industry with less potential for systemic problems.