中国上市公司高额现金持有动因研究——代理理论抑或权衡理论

对上市公司为何会连续几年持有大量高额现金这种令人困惑的现象,财务理论上有代理理论和权衡理论这两种截然不同的解释。本文以174家在1998—2000年连续3年持有高额现金的上市公司作为研究样本,通过验证高额现金持有的决定因素及其给企业业绩的影响,来回答我国企业的高额现金持有行为可以用何种理论解释。本文认为与代理理论相比,权衡理论更适合用来解释我国企业的高额现金持有行为。我们认为为了更好地维护现金安全,提高企业的资金使用效率,从源头上解决我国企业高现金持有问题,今后更多的应该是从减少企业融资成本、增加投资渠道入手。

Why Chinese Public Listed Corporations Hold High-scale Cashes?

There are two different financial theories,agency theory and trade-off theory to explain why the public listed corporations hold high-scale cashes continuously for several years.According to the agency theory,the high-scale cash holding behaviors manifest the managements and the majority stockholders expropriate the interests of the corporation and the minority stockholders.However,ac- cording to the trade-off theory,the corporations' high-scale cash holding behaviors are their reasonable choice after trading off high- scale cash holding's benefits and costs.Through the investigation of 174 Chinese public listed corporations which hold high-scale ca- shes from 1998 to 2000 continuously,we examine the determinants and the economic consequences of the high-scale cash holding and find that the trade-off theory is more appropriate to explain the PLCs' high cash holding behaviors compared with the agency theory. The paper than concluded that both the government and listed companies should focus on reducing the companies'financing cost and ar- gumenting the investment channels in order to solve the problem of PLCs' high-scale cash holding behaviors,maintain the safety of cash and finally improve the efficiency of fund managenent.