기업다각화가 기업가치에 미치는 영향: 외환위기 회복 이후기간 패널자료분석

Theoretical arguments suggest that diversification has both value-enhancing and valuereducing effects. The potential benefits of operating different lines of business within one firm include greater operating efficiency, less incentive to forego positive net present value projects, greater debt capacity, and lower taxes. Chandler(1977), Lewellen(1971), Majd and Myers(1987), Stulz(1990), Weston(1970), and Williamson(1986) document value gains associated with corporate diversification strategies. The potential costs of diversification include the use of increase discretionary resources to undertake value-decreasing investment, cross-subsidies that allow poor segments to drain resources from better-performing segments, and misalignment of incentives between central and divisional managers. Berger and Ofek(1995), Lang and Stulz(1994), Servaes(1995), Shin and Stulz(1995), Denis, Denis and Sarin(1997), and Billet and Mauer(2000) document significant value losses associated with corporate diversification. Moreover, Comment and Jarrell(1995) show that diversified firms fail to take advantage of the purported benefits of diversification. In addition, Berger and Ofek(1995), Comment and Jarrell(1995), John and Ofek(1995), Liebeskind and Opler(1994), and Gillan, Kensinger and Martin(2000) document a trend toward increased corporate focus in the 1980s and report that this increase in focus is associated with significant increases in shareholder value. Khanna and Palepu(2000) show that there is a quadratic relationship between the degree of affiliated-group diversification and firm performance. They find that accounting and stock market measures of firm performance initially decline with group diversification and subsequently increase once group diversification exceeds a certain level. Generally, there is no clear prediction about the overall value effect of diversification. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of corporate diversification on the corporate value in Korea. We use the balanced panel data for 390 listed companies during the 1999-2003. The panel data sets consist of time series observations on each of 390 crosssectional units. This research suggests a quadratic relationship between corporate value and corporate diversification. We find that corporate value initially increase with enlarges in corporate diversification, however, beyond a certain threshold, decrease with increase in corporate diversification. These results are in contrast to those obtained by Berger and Ofek(1995). They found that, there was a monotonic increase in the magnitude of the value loss from diversification as the extent of diversification increases for U.S. firms. According to this result, over-refocusing and over-diversified firms induce value loss on their firms, and then decrease their value. But optimum level of diversification can reinforce corporate value in Korea. This study also shows that, the choice of methodologies is important in analyzing the relationship between corporate diversification and corporate value. In fixed effect model, we could find that corporate diversification affected on corporate value significantly. But in random effect model and OLS model, we couldn’t have any significant relations.