주식시장의 유동성이 자본구조에 미치는 영향

This paper explores the effects of stock market liquidity on capital structure. Because stock market liquidity reduces equity flotation costs and adverse selection costs due to asymmetric information, it may also affect a firm’s optimal capital structure since a firm's cost of equity impacts its overall cost of capital. Firms have an incentive to choose corporate policy that makes their stocks more liquid because stock market liquidity increases firm value. Managers can increase the liquidity of their firm's stocks through corporate policies such as going public, voluntary disclosure, and distributing ownership among a wide base of shareholders. Firm's capital structure is measured as book leverage and market leverage, and stock market liquidity is measured in two way such as trading volume turnover and Amihud illiquidity measure. In this paper, we show that stock market liquidity has a significant effect on capital structure. Among the liquidity measures, trading volume turnover has a negative and significant effect on capital structure, but Amihud illiquidity measure has a positive and significant effect on capital structure. More liquid firms experience an increase of equity issuing, a decrease of debt issuing, and a decrease in net debt issuing. So to speak, more liquid firms make more active use of equity, while illiquid firms make more active use of debt. These results have implications that firm's financing behavior reacts as in both of trade-off theory and pecking order theory. This paper may have a few limitations because it may be only early study about the effects of stock market liquidity on capital structure of Korean firms. Therefore, we think that it is necessary to expand sample firms and control variables, and use more elaborate analysis methods in the future studies.