최근 들어, 기업의 투자가 부진한 이유를 외국인 투자자가 기업의 투자에 부정적인 영향을 주어서 발생한 것으로 보고 있다. 본 연구에서는 외국인 투자자가 기업의 투자의사 결정에 부정적인 영향을 미치는 있는지 파악하기 위해 정보비대칭에 의한 자본제약이론 관점에서 국내 주요주주와 외국 주요주주가 기업의 투자결정에 미치는 영향이 다른지 분석하고자 한다. 2000년부터 2008년까지 유가증권에 상장된 비금융업 12월 결산법인 중에서 주식을 5% 이상 대량보유한 주요주주가 있는 기업을 대상으로 국내 외부 주요주주 지분과 국외 외부 주요주주 지분이 실물투자인 설비투자율과 연구개발투자인 연구개발투자율에 미치는 영향을 정태적 패널분석을 실시하여 분석하였다.
분석결과는 첫째, 국외 외부 주요주주가 국내 외부 주요주주보다 자본제약 기업의 투자-현금흐름 민감도를 감소시키는 역할을 하고 있다. 둘째, 연구개발투자율을 종속변수로 분석한 결과, 국외 외부 주요주주가 국내 외부 주요주주보다 통계적으로 유의하게 연구개발 투자를 증대시키고 있으며, 투자-현금흐름 민감도를 감소시키고 있음을 보이고 있다. 따라서, 외국인 투자자는 국내 투자자 보다 상대적으로 정보비대칭을 완화함으로써 기업의 투자에 긍정적인 영향을 주고 있음을 보이고 있다고 할 수 있다.
The purpose of this study is to investigate how the foreign outside blockholders affect a firm's investment policy. Since the Asian financial crisis, Korean corporation’s total investment has been decreasing. To name a few, they are structural obstacles to investment (Jeon, Kim, and Ha, 2005), increase in the cost of capital caused by decrease in debt ratio (Jeon, 2006), market and policy uncertainty (Lee, 2004), and increase in foreign ownership. The structural obstacles include the decreases in profitable investment opportunities, the globalization of production bases and Chinese growth, and weakened entrepreneurial momentum. This study particularly focuses on how foreign blockholders influence firms’ investment decisions. If, for instance, foreign investors have only short-term interest under the limitation of information asymmetry, they are not likely to be interested in firms’ long-run investment policies while demanding high dividend payout to recoup their investment as early as possible. The sharp increase in foreign ownership ratio may also create the market environment inductive to more hostile M&As in Korea. Therefore, it has been argued that firms had to spend a lot of cash to repurchase their own shares in the capital market, thereby decreasing investments.
As such, this study analyzes the effects of foreign shareholders on firms’ investment policy from the view point of the theory of financial constraints under information asymmetry. Myers and Majluf (1984) argue that the firms with financial constraints have under-investment problems and prefer inside financing to outside capital, when there is an information asymmetry between inside managers and outside investors. Fazzari, Hubbard, and Petersen (1988) and Agca and Mozumdar (2008) also show that as the degree of information asymmetry (financial constraints) is mitigated, the investment-cash flow sensitivity decreases, while the investment of firms increases.
Thus, this study argues that if the foreign investors are not disadvantaged by more information asymmetry than domestic shareholders are, they are more likely to play leading roles in increasing the investment of firms by facilitating the firms’ access to capital under reduced financial constraints. On the other hand, if the foreign shareholders suffer more information asymmetry than domestic shareholders do, they may be interested in short-term performance and demand higher dividend payout to the shareholders, consequently leading to the decrease of corporate investment.
The previous studies with regards to this issue have shown conflicting results. Park (2004) and Sul (2006) argue that as foreign ownership increases, the corporate investment in facilities decreases. In contrast, Bin and Cho (2005), Lee (2005), Bae and Hwang (2006) show that the increases in foreign ownership do not directly affect firms’ investments in facilities. Kim (2003), Park and Lee (2006), Cho and Sul (2006) show that the foreign ownership is positively related with the R&D investments. However, Lee (2006) argues that the foreign shareholders do not necessarily affect firms’ investment in R&D.
This study is different from the previous literature in that this analysis uses both fixed assets and R&D as the variables affecting firms’ investment decision. In addition, we conduct our studies on a separate pool of domestic and foreign outside blockholders who have more than 5% ownership from the rest of blockholders. Further, this study looks into whether and how domestic and foreign outside blockholders affect investment-cash flow sensitivity. Finally, we use the financial variables of all the non-financial companies listed in Korea exchange for the period of year 2000 through 2008. All the data are collected from the annual reports provided in the DART system of Financial Supervisory Service and KIS-value data base. After deleting some outliers having 1% extreme financial variables, 391 firms’ variables are used for this study.
The static panel analysis is employed because this model considers the time series and cross-sectional characteristics as follows:INV_it = α + βMajorown_(it-1) + χ_(it-1) + _1γ+u_(it),where INV_(it) is the investment level of a firm i and year t as a dependent variable. Firms’ investments in both facilities and R&D are used as dependent variables, separately. Majorown_(it-1) is the ownership of major shareholders, and x_(it-1) reflects control variables including cash flow, cost of capital, profitability, inside ownership, firm size, and growth rate.
The results of our analysis are summarized as follows: Firstly, the panel analysis of the investments in plant and equipment as a dependent variable shows that outside foreign shareholders often end up decreasing the investment-cash flow sensitivity of firms by increasing the firms’ financial constraints. This result implies that outside foreign shareholders in the end play positive roles in reducing information asymmetry.
Secondly, the panel analysis of firms’ R&D investment shows that more outside foreign shareholders’ involvement increases R&D investment significantly more than that of outside domestic blockholders; in short, foreign shareholders bring about the effect of decreasing investment-cash flow sensitivity of firms while tightening capital constraints. These observations imply that outside foreign investors play important roles in mitigating the information asymmetry problem while increasing the investments in R&D more than domestic blockholders do. That is, the foreign investors have contributed to the increase in the investments by making firms’ capital financing easier through the mitigation of information asymmetry. Some limitations in this study may arise due to some potential measurement errors of the firm size and retained earning/equity, used for the proxies of information asymmetry.
