가족기업과 비가족기업의 원가 비대칭성 차이에 관한 연구

This research examines differences in the cost stickiness between family firms and non-family firms. Anderson et al.(2003) document that a firm’s cost behavior is asymmetric for a change of activities: a firm’s costs increase higher when sales revenues increase than they decrease when sales revenues decrease. They point out that a delayed resource- adjustment process due to a self-interested manager’s behavior and the uncertainty about the permanence of decreasing demand are main reasons for the asymmetric cost behavior. Based on this idea, this research investigates how the ownership structure and the decision horizon in family firms affect the asymmetric cost behavior. In family firms, the agency problem between the owner and the manager is mitigated because family members directly participate in the management of firms. Also, it is well known that family-firms have longer horizons in their decision making than non-family firms, implying that their resource-adjustment process may be less sensitive to the temporary change of sales than the adjustment process in the non-family firms. Futhermore, managers in non-family firms have more incentives to focus on the short-term performance to maintain their positions and to increase compensation: they can adjust resources more quickly in response to the decrease of sales. Considering the lower agency problem and the longer decision horizon, we test whether there exists difference in the cost stickiness between family firms and non-family firms using the data of Korean listed companies from 2004 to 2010. The result shows that there exists difference in the asymmetric cost behavior between family firms and non-family firms: the cost is more elastic to the decrease of sales in family firms than in non-family firms. The result implies that ownership structure and the agency cost in family firms can be important variables in determining cost structure.