재무제약 하에서 최대주주가 배당정책에 미치는 영향: 중소기업을 대상으로

This paper examines the effect of largest shareholders on dividend policy in small business. The dividend policy is one of the important business decisions and is affected by demand of shareholders. Prior studies suggest that decision on dividend payout is determined by the trade-off between agency cost and the cost of borrowing. Unlike large companies with diffuse shareholders, the effect of largest shareholders in small companies is greater. According to National Statistical Office, 98%of small companies in Korea have owner-controlled structure. This implies that majority of shareholders in small companies is the largest shareholders and the impact of largest shareholders in small business is significant. This paper investigates the effect of largest shareholders on dividend policy. Specifically, this paper examines the relationship between dividend payout ratio and the portion of largest shareholders. Then we test whether this relationship still holds when financial constraint of companies is high. Using 3,573 observations from 2001 to 2015, we find that small firms with high portion of largest shareholders are more likely to pay dividends. This is consistent with interest-alignment hypothesis. This suggests that even small companies have an incentive to decreases agency cost by paying dividends. We further find that when small companies is under financial constraints, the firms with high portion of largest shareholders are less likely to pay dividends. Our findings of this paper provide the evidence that even small companies with high portions of largest shareholders have incentive to pay dividend to alleviate interest-conflicts between a firm and outside shareholders. Moreover, this relationship is affected by the condition of financial constraints.