소유지배괴리의 규범적 타당성

It is often believed that the scope of the Korean corporate governance policy is limited to large corporations, but a closer look at the governance rules and regulations reveals that it concurrently or at least potentially applies to small and medium-sized enterprises. The norm of the policy is based on the principal-agency theory, which recognises that ownership-control discrepancy can have adverse effects on the national economy. However, empirical work on this premise reports mixed results. In addition, in Korea, relationship between ownership-control discrepancy and firm value may be time-varying given the structural changes (eg improved internal and external monitoring) in the regulatory environment over the past two decades, the increasing complexity of Korean conglomerates’ structure and capital market openness. To this end, we examine whether ownership-control discrepancy and firm value has a relationship and, if a relationship is present, whether it is time varying by estimating correlation between them. The results show that the correlation is negative in the early 2000s (2001-2005), while the correlation coefficient is positive in the last five years (2018-2022). This suggests that it requires a more sophisticated approach to justify ownership-control discrepancy as a normative basis for corporate governance regulation.