The Role of Corporate Governance in Financially Constrained Firms

Purpose – This paper empirically investigates what factors contribute to management decisions by corporate governance in the Korean stock market. In the paper, dividends and investments were imployed as management decisions and major stockholders’ shares and foreign investors’ shares were used as corporate governance. Research design, data, and Methodology – Samples are constructed by manufacturing firms listed on the stock market of Korea as well as those who settle accounts in December from 2001 to 2018. Financial institutions are excluded from the sample as their accounting procedures, governance and regulations differ. This study adopted the panel regression model to assess the sample construction including yearly and cross-sectional data. Results – This results support the literatures that major shareholders showed insignificance to dividends, positive significance to investment in financially unconstrained firms and negative significance to investment in financially constrained firms. Whereas foreign investors favor firms to increase dividends but they decrease investments only in financially constrained firms. Conclusion – This paper documented evidence that financial constrained firms use dividends for their investment and foreign investors decrease investments under financial constraints. But for dividends decisions, foreign investors give significant positive impacts irrespective of financial constraints.