기업지배구조, 대규모기업집단과 대리인 비용

This study aims to investigate whether the agency costs vary depending on the types of corporate governance, mainly motivated by recent cases of tunneling, propping, and expropriation as manifested by several large business groups in Korea. Agency problem relates either to vertical costs arising from the relationship between stockholders and managers, or to horizontal costs associated with the potential conflicts between large and minority stockholders. Business conglomerates are capable of exercising significant influence upon the managerial decisions of member firms. The major stockholders, normally the founder-owners of a conglomerate, are able to implement internal monitoring mechanisms to check imprudent and reckless operations practiced by employed executives, thereby mitigating the vertical agency costs. On the contrary, mainly due to the monopolistic power with regard to resource and decision controls, the major stockholders may harm the interests of non-controlling stockholders by engaging in tunneling, propping, and expropriation, resulting in the rise of vertical agency costs. The Korean Corporate Governance Service (CGS) was established in 2002 with the view to enhance the corporate governance of Korean business community. Since its founding, CGS evaluates the governance system of Korean business enterprises listed in KRX and KOSDAQ and awards prizes to selected firms with superior governance structures. In this paper, we analysed the difference in the agency costs of selected firms designated as having superior governance structures relative to control sample firms. We also compare the level of relative agency costs between business conglomerate member firms versus control firms. We compared 664 firm-years representing the superior class against 4,043 control firm observations over the 3 year period from 2009 through 2011. Agency costs are measured by the value of principal component derived from the difference scores of three selected ratios between individual sample firms and the three benchmark companies designated as the superior governance firms for three consecutive years under study. The ratios employed include asset turnover, operating expense to sales ratio, and earnings before interest, tax, and depreciation. We conduct regression analyses whereby agency cost index is regressed on corporate governance superiority dummy, large business group dummy, along with several other control variables. The results of the empirical analyses indicate that the agency costs of superior governance group marginally exceed those of control group, whereas no significant difference is observed between business group member firms versus non-member counterparts. Similar results are obtained from additional analysis which relies on alternative proxy for agency costs. These results raise some doubts about the effectiveness of the CGS led evaluation system or suggest a room for further elaboration in future research methodology.