Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Equity Agency Costs'

Equity agency costs are important to the firm and the management of these costs is a critical element of corporate governance, yet empirical research that focuses on the magnitude and impact of agency costs is limited. This thesis sets out to furnish empirical evidence in the area of corporate ownership with a particular focus on the magnitude of equity agency costs as well as the relation that exists between the largest shareholder in a firm and equity agency costs and between the largest shareholder and the dividend policy that a firm adopts. This thesis provides an empirical analysis of the effect of corporate ownership, together with other governance mechanisms on equity agency conflicts for the largest 500 Australian listed firms. The results from this analysis provide strong support for the view that equity agency costs are related to corporate ownership. Specifically, there is evidence of a significant non-linear relation between inside ownership and the proxies for agency costs. Further, the results demonstrate that other governance mechanisms, particularly board size, board leadership and short-term debt financing, are effective in improving the use of firm assets, yet they do not seem to restrain firm management from incurring excessive discretionary operating expenses. This thesis also extends the investigation of the corporate ownership-equity agency cost relation by focusing on the largest shareholder for 9,165 listed firms drawn from 43 countries around the world. The results suggest that cross-sectional variation in equity agency costs can be partly attributable to corporate ownership. Specifically, there is evidence of a statistically significant non-linear relation between the shareholding of the largest shareholder and the agency cost proxies. The type of the largest shareholder, i.e. whether the largest shareholder is an insider or a financial institution, is also important in analysis of this relation. Further, debt financing, dividend policy and legal origin vary in their impact on the agency cost proxies. This thesis also investigates the interaction between the largest shareholder and dividend policy for 8,279 listed firms drawn from 37 countries around the world. Consistent with previous studies, the results suggest that firms are more likely to pay dividends when profitability is high, debt is low, investment opportunities are limited, or when the largest shareholder is not an insider. It is also apparent that largest shareholding and dividend payout are related and that, consistent with the extant literature, legal system does matter in dividend policy decisions. Together, the results imply that equity agency costs vary with corporate ownership though this relation remains, of course, the subject of continuing investigation in finance. A major contribution of this thesis is demonstrating that corporate ownership, particularly the largest shareholder, plays a pivotal role in controlling agency costs. Accordingly, this suggests the following policy implication: by improving the legal environment and regulatory constraints imposed on large shareholders as well as legal protection for minority shareholders, the efficiency gains generated from large shareholder control can be translated into higher firm valuation to the benefit of all shareholders in the firm.

In a 2004 study, Harvey, Lin and Roper argue that debt makers with a commitment to monitoring can create value for outside shareholders whenever information asymmetry and agency costs are pronounced. I investigate Harvey, Lin and Roper's claim for bank loans by empirically testing the effect of information asymmetry and direct agency costs on the abnormal returns of the borrowers' stock around the announcement of bank loans. I divide my study into two main sections. The first section tests whether three proxies of the direct agency costs of equity are equally significant in measuring the direct costs associated with outside equity agency problems. I find that the asset utilization ratio proxy is the most statistically significant proxy of the direct agency costs of equity using a Chow F-test statistic. The second main section of my dissertation includes and event study and a cross-sectional analysis. The event study results document significant and positive average abnormal returns of 1.01% for the borrowers' stock on the announcement day of bank loans. In the cross sectional analysis of the borrowers' average abnormal stock returns, I find that higher quality and more reputable banks/lenders provide a reliable certification to the capital market about the low level of the borrowers' direct agency costs of equity and information asymmetry. This certification hypothesis holds only for renewed bank loans. In other words, in renewing the borrowers' line of credit, the bank/lender is actually confirming that the borrower has a low level of information asymmetry and direct costs of equity. Given such a certificate from the banks/lenders, shareholders reward the company/borrower by bidding the share price up in the capital market.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2007.
Document formatted into pages; contains 100 pages. Title from PDF of title page. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The general focus of my dissertation, which consists of two essays, is on how changes in the financial and economic environment surrounding a firm affect managerial incentives and firm policies regarding investment in physical capital, innovation, equity offerings, and repurchases. The first essay in my dissertation examines how product market competition affects firms' investment decisions. While competition among firms benefits consumers via lower prices, greater product variety, higher product quality, and greater innovation, recent studies provide evidence that competition has been declining in the U.S. economy over the past decade. The evidence shows that American firms' profits are at near-record levels relative to GDP and are persistent. Industries have become more concentrated as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and barriers to entry have risen and the rate of new entry has been declining for decades. Taking these findings at face value, we examine empirically whether companies feel less compelled to invest in physical capital and in research and development because they face fewer threats from rival firms. Using both traditional proxies and recently developed text-based measures of industry concentration, we show that firms operating in competitive industries invest significantly more in both physical capital and research and development relative to their peers in concentrated industries. We also report that the propensity to invest less by managers of monopolistic firms is partially mitigated by superior corporate governance that reduces the agency problem, and by certain product market characteristics such as low pricing power and low product differentiation/entry barriers. However, after accounting for all these mitigating factors, the negative association between industry concentration and investment persists. Our results are robust to including various control variables and exclusion of firms from industries that face significant competition from imports. The results are also robust to controlling for endogeneity caused by missing time-invariant and time-varying industry level factors that could potentially be related to both the level of concentration and investments. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that firms in competitive industries have a greater incentive to invest and innovate to survive and thrive in a competitive environment relative to the managers of the firms in more concentrated industries whose incentive to invest and innovate is to maintain their monopoly rents. Our findings have obvious policy implications in that investment and hence economic growth is being adversely affected in the current era of increasing industry concentration and declining competition. The second essay in my dissertation investigates whether information contained in equity issues and buybacks is fully incorporated into prices such that the market reaction to subsequent earnings announcements is unrelated to those corporate actions. Korajczyk at al. (1991) argue that firms prefer to issue equity when the market is most informed about the quality of the firm to prevent adverse selection costs associated with new equity issues. This implies that equity issues tend to follow credible information releases contained in earnings announcements. However, analyzing a sample of 19,466 SEO pricing dates between 1970 and 2015 and 15,106 buyback announcements between 1994 and 2015 shows that a considerable number of equity offerings and repurchase announcements take place before the announcement of earnings. About 28% of buybacks and 32% of SEO pricings are made in the three weeks prior to an earnings announcement. Given these statistics, we examine whether these corporate actions provide information about upcoming earnings announcements (earnings predictability) to the extent that new information has not been fully incorporated into prices by market participants. We find evidence of earnings predictability: the market reaction to earnings following buyback announcements is higher by 5.1% than the reaction to earnings following equity issues over the (-1,+30) window when four-factor abnormal returns are used; the difference is 2.2% when unadjusted returns are considered. The results are robust to several alternate sample construction methodologies. There are at least two puzzling effects of earnings predictability that are difficult to reconcile with the market efficiency hypothesis. First, there is an incomplete adjustment to SEO pricings and buyback announcements that results in residual market reaction to earnings announcements. Second, prices continue to drift after earnings announcements: upward for buybacks and downward for SEO pricings. Unlike post-earnings announcement drift, the drift documented here does not depend on the market reaction to earnings announcement. We test several reasons for this anomalous behavior including prior returns, price, size of buyback or SEO, analyst forecast errors, and bid-ask spread. We find that information asymmetry proxies partially explain the persistence of earnings predictability following SEO pricings and buyback announcements.
Ph. D.

Agency Costs of Controlling Minority Shareholders (coauthored with Henrik Cronqvist) estimates the agency costs of controlling minority shareholders (CMSs) using a panel of Swedish listed firms. CMSs are owners who have a control stake of the firm’s votes while owning only a minority fraction of the firm’s equity. The study documents that families in control are almost exclusively CMSs through an extensive use of dual-class shares. The results show that increased ownership of votes by a controlling owner is associated with an economically and statistically significant decrease in firm value, but that the decrease in firm value is significantly larger for firms with family CMSs than for firms with financial institutions or corporations in control. This indicates that the agency costs of family CMSs are larger than the agency costs of other controlling owners.Family Ownership, Control Considerations, and Corporate Financing Decisions: An Empirical Analysis analyzes the relation between concentrated family control and firms’ choice of capital structure for a panel of Swedish listed firms. The results suggest that the capital structure choices made by firms with families in control are influenced by the controlling families’ desire to protect their control, and that the resulting capital structures are likely to increase the agency costs of family control. The Choice between Rights Offerings and Private Equity Placements (coauthored with Henrik Cronqvist) analyzes the determinants of the choice between rights offerings and private equity placements using a sample of rights offerings and private placements made by listed Swedish firms. The results indicate that control considerations explain why firms make uninsured rights offerings. The evidence also suggest that private placements, and to some extent underwritten rights offerings, are made by potentially undervalued firms in order to overcome underinvestment problems resulting from asymmetric information about firm value. Furthermore, private placements are frequently made in conjunction with the establishment of a product market relationship between purchaser and seller, which is consistent with equity ownership reducing contracting costs in new product market relationships. Why Agency Costs Explain Diversification Discounts (coauthored with Henrik Cronqvist and Peter Högfeldt) studies diversification within the real estate industry, in which firms can diversify over property types and geographical regions. Similar to previous studies, this essay documents the existence of a diversification discount. However, the major cause of the diversification discount is not diversification per se but anticipated costs due to rent dissipation in future diversifying acquisitions. Firms expected to pursue non-focusing strategies do indeed diversify more, are valued ex ante at a 20% discount over firms anticipated to follow a focusing strategy, and are predominantly family controlled. The ex ante diversification discount is, therefore, a measure of agency costs.  The Difference in Acquirer Returns between Takeovers of Public Targets and Takeovers of Private Targets shows, for a sample of Swedish takeovers, that the average acquirer abnormal return is positive and significant when the target firm is privately held but insignificant when the target firm is listed on a stock exchange. These results are robust when controlling for sample selection problems and other variables capable of explaining acquirer returns. The evidence is consistent with greater acquirer bargaining power and resolution of information asymmetries in takeovers of private targets.
Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2002

In this thesis, I exploit accounting issues in the Chinese context with a particular focus on the role of government. The thesis consists of three empirical essays, examining how the state coordinates among the state-owned enterprises in executive compensation (essay 1), how the government regulates the dividend payouts of listed firms (essay 2) and how the delisting regulation influences the accounting choices of listed firms (essay 3).The first essay examines relative performance evaluation (RPE) in China. Previous studies of RPE for executive compensations in Western developed markets have produced mixed findings. This is partly because the dispersion of share ownership in Western capital markets does not closely correspond with the single-principal/multi-agent theoretical setting assumed by Holmstrom (1982). In this study, I exploit the existence of a large number of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China to examine RPE in a setting closer to the theoretical assumption. I find that SOEs are more likely to use RPE for executive compensation than non-SOEs. This is consistent with better cross-firm coordination in executive contracting among SOEs under a common “state” principal than among non-SOEs with dispersed principals similar to Western firms. Furthermore, I find a more pronounced RPE effect among SOEs that are larger or have poorer past performance. This implies that the state principal has greater incentives to monitor strategically important firms or those in distress. The second essay examines the market reaction to and earnings management choices around changes in the regulations requiring a higher minimum dividend payout in China to shed new light on the determinants of dividend payout policy. I find that the market reaction is more positive for firms that paid less than the new required minimum payout than for those that paid more than the new required minimum, consistent with agency cost explanations of dividend payout. In addition, I find that low dividend payers exhibit a greater tendency to manage their earnings downwards to comply with the earnings-based threshold, and investors can “see through” such earnings management behaviors. My findings support the view of DeAngelo, DeAngelo and Skinner (2009) that agency costs of free cash flow retention are an important part of the dividend payout story. The third essay explores the earnings-based delisting rule in China that provides particularly strong motivation to manage earnings above the loss/profit threshold. I identify two groups of firms that successfully avoid being ST-ed, i.e. firms with a one-year loss before returning to profit, and firms with consecutive small profits. I provide a comprehensive examination of earnings management in terms of accruals management, real earnings management and non-operating income, to investigate whether Chinese firms manage earnings either to avoid reporting a loss or to avoid reporting two consecutive losses. Though there are mixed results sensitive to the research design for earnings management pattern in the two groups of firms, this study provides insights into earnings management induced by a government regulation.

Business Administration/Finance
Ph.D.
Corporate insiders frequently borrow from lending institutions and pledge personal equity shares as collateral for the loan. Using manually collected pledge data for January 2007-December 2011, I examine how this phenomena affects firm investors and analyze agency conflicts between pledging managers and (a) outside shareholders, and (b) bondholders. Pledging potentially influences investor risk through changing managerial incentives and/or contingency risk from ill-timed margin calls. Findings suggest influential insiders extract private benefits of control at the expense of outside shareholders through pledging. Difference-in-differences regressions utilizing an exogenous shock to lending supply indicate pledging corresponds with a 9.9% relative increase in stock volatility – controlling for changes in fundamentals – and support a causal interpretation of the relation between pledging and equity risk. Despite apparently harming equity investors however, further analysis suggests pledging benefits bondholders, and corresponds with an economically and statistically significant reduction in yield spreads on corporate bonds. Robustness tests evidence reductions in risky financing when insiders pledge, corroborating the negative relation between pledging and cost of debt and consistent with mitigated agency conflicts between managers and bondholders.
Temple University--Theses

Ce travail analyse le rôle des sociétés de capital-investissement dans la formation d’alliances stratégiques sur le marché français du capital-investissement. Après nous être fait une idée de l’importance du phénomène à l’aide des informations nouvelles que nous avons générées par notre propre enquête, nous apportons une explication au phénomène observé. L’analyse théorique se fait sous l’angle de la création de valeur actionnariale, en recourant conjointement aux théories contractuelles et cognitives. Les théories sociologiques des réseaux viennent compléter les principaux arguments de ces deux cadres théoriques. Le modèle explicatif qui en découle est ensuite mis à l’épreuve empirique à l’aide d’une étude multi-méthodes à visée infirmationniste, combinant une analyse économétrique et une étude de cas multiples. Nos résultats permettent de conclure que les sociétés françaises de capital-investissement jouent un rôle tant intentionnel que non intentionnel dans la formation d’alliances stratégiques pour leurs participations. Ces rôles mettent en avant une intervention tant passive qu’active des sociétés françaises de capital-investissement. Bien que l’argumentation cognitive trouve, dans son ensemble, plus de support que l’argumentation contractuelle, l’analyse fait ressortir l’intérêt de recourir à une utilisation conjointe des théories contractuelles et cognitives qui se révèlent complémentaires
This research analyses the role of Private Equity firms in the formation of strategic alliances within the field of the French Private Equity market. We start to provide evidence of its importance from new survey information, before offering an explanation of the organizational phenomenon. The study addresses the questions of how and why Private Equity firms act as relational intermediaries to help their portfolio companies form alliances. Both questions are investigated in the light of the Private Equity firms’ contribution to the value creation process that comes with alliance formation. Answers are provided by means of three jointly used theoretical frameworks: (1) mainstream theories (transaction cost theory and the positive theory of agency); (2) the knowledge based view; and 3) social network theories to complement the resulting from jointly use of the previous two theories. The theoretical construct is then tested empirically by means of a multi-method study with explanatory design, based on the pattern of joint evidence from both statistical tests and a multiple case study. Results show that French Private Equity firms do play a role in alliance formation. This role can be intentional as well as non-intentional. Furthermore, although arguments from the knowledge-based perspective finds more support in explaining this behavior than from the mainstream theories, our study highlights the benefits of the joint use of these theories and the complementary nature of them to better explaining the phenomenon as a whole

碩士
國立臺北大學
會計學系
94
The main purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between overvalued equity and agency costs. A series of papers by Jensen (2002; 2005) demonstrate that, when a firm’s equity is overvalued that it will not, except by pure luck, be able to deliver the financial performance the market requires justifying that valuation, managers are likely to take actions designed to meet the market’s optimistic expectations and sustain the overvaluation, instead of disseminating information disappoint capital markets. They are more likely to generate the appearance of improved performance in the short run. Such actions, however, may sacrifice equity value of the firms in the long run. Kothari, Loutskina, Nikolaev (2005) find that, there is a positive relation between leading period returns and year zero accruals for high accrual-decile firms, however the price reverses in subsequent year. In addition, investment-financing decisions and insider trading activity also correspond with the agency theory of overvalued equity. This study uses Earnings-Based Valuation Model to estimate the theoretical value of a firm’s equity with public available information and management foresight information. The difference between actual and theoretical value is misvaluation. By comparing with the misvaluations which happen in different situations, we test whether asymmetric information exists or not. Moreover, taking assets utilization rate, discretional expense rate and firm size as the proxies of agency costs to examine the connection between agency costs and misvaluation. Research data were collected from TSEC listed companies issued seasoned equity from 1994 to 2002, and the major findings are summarized as follows: 1.SEO companies are more likely to issue equity when stock price are overestimated. 2.Misevaluation based on management foresight information is more than misvaluation based on public available information, and the result shows that when the equity is overvalued, information asymmetries is more serious. 3.There is a significantly negative relation between assets utilization rate and misvaluation, as well as firm size and misevaluation. However, as we separate samples into over-group and under-group by positive or negative value of misevaluation, such significant relation only exists in over-group. This finding implied that the relation between agency costs and misvaluation may not be linear.

碩士
逢甲大學
國際貿易所
97
Before 2005, firms only need to prepare annual consolidated financial statement, and the criteria of involving subsidiary into consolidated financial statement are extremely strictless. Even though some firms are willing to prepare semi-annual consolidated financial statement, the approving by board of director and accountant is still unnecessary. Stockholder supposed could monitor manager through consolidated financial statement, however, lag information and lack of information authentic and transparency difficult the monitoring behavior, which lead to serious equity agency problem. After implementing revisional SFAS No.7, the problem of lag information and lack of information authentic and transparency phenomenon shall be improved, and expected to diminish agency problem between manager and stockholders. Using data from Taiwanese listing firms issuing bonds and equity from 2000 to 2007 to study that is shareholder wealth effects changed after implementing revisional SFAS No.7. The empirical result shows that revisionary SFAS No.7 reduced the difference of shareholder wealth effects of security offering announcement between MNCs and DCs (and between high and low involved MNCs); and reduced the difference of shareholder wealth effects of security offering announcements associated to equity agency costs between MNCs and DCs. However, the empirical result doesn’t support the hypothesis：New SFAS No.7 reduces the difference of shareholder wealth effects of security offering announcements associated to equity agency costs between high and low involved MNCs. We also find that compare to the shareholders’ wealth effect, the effect of new SFAS No.7 on firm performance are more positive for MNCs than DCs.

碩士
逢甲大學
會計學系
101
The study is based on TSE-listing high-tech companies from 1997 to 2005 to probe into the relationship between overvalued equity and agency costs. The present study adopts panel smooth transition regression model (PSTR) to examine the effect of overvalued/undervalued equity (PF) on agency costs. The empirical evidence confirms the non-linear relationship between the market value of equity and agency costs. When the PF ranges from 0.4631 to 1.3351, the PF is negative relevant to the free cash flow. However, when the PF is above 1.3351 or below 0.4631, it is positive relevant to the free cash flow. Meanwhile, when the PF is below 1.569, the PF is positive relevant to the management’s share; however, when it is above 1.569, the PF is negative relevant to the management’s share. The former literature mostly went to extremes, roughly categorizing the market value of equity into the overvalued and the undervalued groups. The present study confirms the non-linear relationship between the PF and the agency costs to improve the former literature.

Yes
This study examines stock market reaction to the announcement of various forms of seasoned issues in China. Our empirical evidence demonstrates that market reactions differ in ways that suggest a difference between management's internal assessment and the market's assessment of the stock price. The market responds unfavourably to the announcement, notably in the case of rights issues and also with regard to open offers. Private placements experience an unfavourable pre‐announcement reaction, which contrasts with the favourable reaction after the event. Convertible bond issues generate positive excess returns consistent with the market's confidence that they can help to align management and shareholders’ interests. Further investigation shows that market reaction is related to factors specific to the issuer and issue by reference to the period immediately surrounding the issue. Specifically, ownership concentration, agency matters connected with equity offerings, investor protection connected with fund allocation and security pricing, and the influence of powerful moneyed interests together provide an instructive insight into market reaction. Institutional inefficiency pertaining to underwriting, auditing, analysts’ forecasts and credit ratings are found to have a weak association with market price, consistent with due public scepticism concerning management and their gatekeepers.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
財務金融學研究所
102
This study explores the relation between the managerial ability and the agency problems between boards and minority equity holders (later denoted as B-E agency problem) by employing CEO turnover data in the past 20 years. We employ Demerjian (2012) to estimate CEO ability and Chen, Liao, Chen (2012) to estimate the cost of B-E agency problem.The empirical results of this study show that, CEO’s ability significantly affects the firm’s B-E agency problem. The higher a firm''s CEO''s ability, the more serious the firm''s B-E agency problem. Furthermore, we find that the instability in a firm''s CEOs’ ability also significantly affect the firm''s B-E agency problem.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
財務金融學研究所
101
This study explores the relation between the agency problems between boards and minority equity holders (later denoted as B-E agency problem) and firm location by using the B-E agency proxy developed by Taylor (2010). By employing CEO turnover data in the past 20 years, we hypothesize that remotely located firms are more likely to suffer higher B-E agency problem because geographic location limits the ability of minority equity investors to monitor the boards of remotely located firms. We use five different variables to represent location and remoteness of the firm’s headquarters. The empirical results of this study show that a firm’s location significantly affects its B-E agency problem. Higher distance to major city worsens the B-E agency problem.

碩士
國立交通大學
經營管理研究所
94
Based on the central agency problem between controlling shareholder and minor shareholders, this research uses the five dimensions, which namely ownership structure, board composition, manage pattern, abnormal relatet party transaction, and stock overinvestment of controlling shareholder amounting to fourteen variables, to investage the relationships between central agency problem and the equity capital cost for Taiwain listing electronic companies. Empirical results are summarized below:1.In terms of ownership structure, the larger the cash flow rights of the controlling shareholder is, the larger the positive incentive effect is, and leads to higher equity capital cost.2.When the deviation between the voting rights and the cash flow rights is larger, it implys larger negative invasion effect and results in higher equity capital cost.3.In terms of the board composition, when controlling shareholder members occupy fewer directors or supervisor sits and the company has more independent directors or supervisors, the board is less dominated by controlling shareholder and leads to the lower equity capital cost. 4.In terms of management pattern, when the shares held by institutional investors are higher, the external monitors are better for the companies and lead to lower equity capital cost.5.In terms of abnormal related party transaction, there is no obvious relationships between the variable and the equity capital cost.6.In terms of stock overinvestment of the controlling shareholder, when the pledged share ratio and the overinvestiment ratio is higher, stock overinvestment behavior of the controlling shareholder is more apparent and results in higher equity cpital cost. We combine the fourteen variables into one Corporate Governance Index (CGI) and have shown that index is negatively related to equity capital cost. Higer CGI leads to lower equity cost because the central agency problem is slight and the interests of the minor shareholder could be less deprived by the controlling shareholder.