한국 상장사 거래신용에 관한 연구

This paper studies on the empirical characteristics of the trade credit of Korean listed companies. Using the DataGuide DB, we retrieved the financial data of 2,244 manufacturing companies listed on KRX from 1981 to 2015. We adopted 3 methodologies – pooling OLS, Fixed effect(FE) panel model, and system GMM – and compared the estimated results. Our main findings are as follows: First, there are strong serial auto-correlations in the two trade credit variables – account receivables and account payables. The auto-coefficients lie between 0.56 and 0.76, controlling other relationships such as liquidity, tangibility, profitability, leverage, size, listed markets, financial distress conditions, subperiods, and industries. Second, there are overall decreasing trends over the past 30 years in the trade credit, though the statistical significance is not so robust under the some specifications. But we can observe considerable variations of these yearly trends by industries. Third, statistically the most important and significant factors are size and profitability. We interpret that these findings are related with the accessibility of external financing. But our evidence on this interpretation is not so clear and we need further elaborate empirical studies using more comprehensive and detailed firm-level information. Lastly, we find statistical significance in the profitability variable especially for account receivables and in the tangibility variable especially for account payables in the OLS estimation. This result implies that profitable firms are prone to provide more trade credit and firms with more tangibile assets tend to get trade credit more easily. But these results are not robust in the FE or system GMM estimations.