기업지배구조와 주주부의 배분에 관한 연구

In this paper, we examine one important over-looked area in finance: the relationship between corporate governance and wealth redistribution to shareholders. We find that firms with sound governance practices are associated with both high firm value and high dividend payments using a set of unique, comprehensive survey data on corporate governance practices of firms listed in the Korea Stock Exchange. This positive effect of good corporate governance on payout policies is further accentuated with firms having greater investment opportunities and low agency costs. This suggests that firms practicing good corporate governance are willing to send out positive signals to the market by paying out higher dividends when they face a great investment opportunities with low agency costs, so that they can achieve the goal of low cost borrowing in the long run. The importance of corporate governance reform in enhancing firm value has been stressed by policy makers and academicians around the world in recent years. The majority of the existing studies however have primarily focused on the determinants of corporate governance practices and the relationship between corporate governance and firm value. For example, Black(2001), Klapper and Love(2003), and Durnev and Kim(2005) use governance indexes obtained from survey data and find the positive relationship between corporate governance and firm value. However, the corporate governance scoring survey results reflected in theses studies are generally from for-profit organizations such as Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia(CLSA) Score or S&P's Corporate Governance Score. The problem with using these data is that they can be potentially biased because the survey results are likely to reflect the business interests between the rating institutions and their client firms. On the other hand, the Korea Corporate Governance Service(KCGS), a not-for-profit institution affiliated with the Korea Stock Exchange, surveys listed firms annually to observe the progress in their corporate governance reforms. In the existing literature, only a few studies explore the economic consequences of firms practicing good corporate governance. Among the few studies on this issue, Bhojraj and Sengupta(2003) find that firms with greater institutional ownership and stronger outside board control enjoy lower bond yields and higher ratings on their new bond issues. This suggests that governance mechanisms reduce the cost of debt capital by mitigating agency costs and by reducing information asymmetry between the firm and the lenders. This study extends this line of inquiry by examining the cross-sectional relation between the effectiveness of corporate governance practices and dividend payout policies. We focus our attention on firms' dividend payments instead of share repurchases, since dividends are currently the dominant means of redistributing corporate wealth to shareholders in Korea. Furthermore, stock repurchases are largely used as an instrument against aggressive takeover attempts by controlling shareholders in Korea. This study contributes to the corporate finance literature on the economic consequences of sound corporate governance by examining the relationship between governance rankings and the firms' payout policies. Our findings are consistent with the view by La Porta et al.(2000) that insiders at listed Korean firms with poor protection of minority shareholder rights are likely to suffer a lack of incentives to return corporate earnings to shareholders. An enhanced understanding of the role of governance practices in determining dividend policies provides us with better insights into the systems that can minimize insiders' expropriation of minority shareholders.