Abstract
The paper analyses to what extent ownership structure, capital structure, and dividend policy as corporate governance mechanisms drive the firm value. From a data panel of publicly quoted Chilean firms for the years 2002–2010, we find that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between ownership concentration and firm value. The positive slope is supported by the supervision hypothesis; whilst the negative relation between ownership concentration and firm value is supported by the expropriation hypothesis. We also find that there is a positive impact of both leverage and the dividend pay-out on the firm value. In this case, these two mechanisms reduce the free cash flows which otherwise might be used opportunistically by managers in their own interests (free rider problem). Contrary to the previous empirical literature in Chile, it is found that the mere fact that a firm is affiliated to a business group/conglomerate impacts positively its value. This positive effect is basically driven by the development of intragroup capital markets, and the governance imposed by the rules of the conglomerate.
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Notes
Shleifer and Vishny (1997) argue that in some countries the agency problem comes from the conflict between controlling owners and minority shareholders, instead of between managers and dispersed shareholders.
Differently than other countries, business groups in Chile are formally defined as a set of companies which present such tight relationships and linkages in their property, management, administration, or credit liabilities, that there are grounds to believe that the economic and financial decisions of those companies are guided by or subordinated to the shared interest of the group, or that there are common financial risks in the credit obtained or in the financial instruments used (Article 96, Title XV, Mercado de Valores’ Law 18.045, passed in October 21st, 1981). The list of economic groups is periodically updated by the Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros (Securities and Insurance Supervisor). Such publications have been released in different Circulares (Official Gazettes). The most recent one is Circular 1.664 (from April 10th, 2003).
Modigliani and Miller (1963) deduced their findings on the fact that interest paid is tax-deductible and hence, firms would enjoy a debt tax shield when funding their activities by long-term debt.
The free cash flows are those available for the discretional use of managers once the future growth opportunities with positive net present values have been financed.
Perks figure prominently among sources of agency costs in the early contribution of Jensen and Meckling (1976). Example of perks may be the costly private jests, plush offices, and private boxes at sports events, country clubs memberships, celebrities on payroll, extravagant entertainment expenses, and expensive art, among many others.
Traditional theories explain that firms pay dividends to signal managers’ information to the markets or to meet demand for pay-outs form some dividend clienteles (DeAngelo et al. 2004; Denis and Osobov 2008), but now it seems to be the agency theory approach the most popular in determining the dividend policy of companies (He 2012; Brockman and Unlu 2009).
Law of Public Corporations No18.046 passed in October 22nd, 1981 establishes that the mandatory dividend is not required in case the company has accrued losses. Additionally, in its Art. 79 this law describes that the dividend must be taken out of the net income, which is defined as the annual earnings minus 10 % of the tax equity capital.
The theoretical definition of Tobin’s Q coefficient is the ratio market value of the firm to replacement cost of assets. Nevertheless, Chung and Pruitt (1994) have compared the values of Q obtained by the method of Lindenberg and Ross (1981) with the market-to-book ratio, obtaining results showing that at least 96.6 % of the variability of Tobin’s Q is explained by the market-to-book ratio. A similar correlation coefficient (96 %) is found by Perfect and Wiles (1994) between these two variables. The findings reported by Adam and Goyal (2008) show that, on a relative scale, the market-to-book assets ratio has the highest information content with respect to investment opportunities.
Recall that if the company does not pay dividends or does not have any debt at all it means necessarily that the company does not use any of these governance devices (this issue will be discussed later on based on the results of Table 5).
The critical value can be obtained by deriving the firm value with respect to the ownership concentration. Letting this partial derivative equal zero, this breakpoint is \(CV = - \left( {\beta_{1} /2\beta_{2} } \right) = 0.537\). The same procedure is applied for all the other regressions.
We used this widely used measure for dividend payout ratio even though many times the paid cash dividends may come from earnings attained in different years.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Dependent variables
Firm value:
where MkCptz it is de market capitalization computed as the product among the year-end close price per share and the number of shares outstanding per i firm; TD it is the total liabilities at the year t; and K it is the replacement value of firms’ assets which is estimated in Perfect and Wiles (1994) as follows:
where RNP it is the replacement cost of net property, plant, and equipment (net fixed assets); RINV it is the replacement value of inventories, TA it is the total assets; BNP it is the book value of net property, plant, and equipment; and BINV it is the book value of inventories.
For t > t 0 where t 0 is the 1 year of observations for a given company in this study; whilst \(RNP{}_{ito} = BNP{}_{ito}\). Moreover, ϕ t is the growth of capital good prices in year t which is defined by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflactor. In other words, \(\phi_{t} = \frac{{NomGDP_{t} }}{{RealGDP_{t} }}100\), where \(NomGDP_{t}\) is the nominal GDP and RealGDP t is the real GDP, both reported by the National Institute of Statistics of Chile. δ it is the real depreciation rate defined as \(\delta_{it} = \frac{{Dep_{it} }}{{BNP_{it} }}\), where \(Dep{}_{it}\) is the annual book depreciation.
I it is the new investment en property, plant, and equipment or capital expenditure which is defined as I it = BNP it − BNP it−1 + Dep it .
where WPI t is the wholesale price index reported by the National Institute of Statistics of Chile. This estimation for the replacement value of inventories assumes that the inventory accounting method is the average cost. For this method, the value of inventories reported at time t is approximately equal to the average of the prices at t − 1 and t. Alternative measure for firm value:
1.2 Independent variables
Ownership structure:
where Cn it (where n = 1…5) denotes the percentage of common shares held by the main shareholder to the five most important shareholders. In the estimation we have also used these variables squared to test the supervision and expropriation hypotheses.
Dividends:
where Dividends it are the cash annual dividends and NI it−1 is the net income.Footnote 11
Firm size: \(SIZE_{it} = Ln(K_{it} )\) defined as the natural logarithm of the replacement cost of total assets Ln(K it ). The natural logarithm transformation is the usual method when dealing with a variable which takes large and positive values.
Quality of investment projects: \(PROF_{it} = \frac{{EBT_{it} }}{{TA_{it} }}\) where EBT it are the earnings before taxes.
Collateral:
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Hoffmann, P.S. Internal corporate governance mechanisms as drivers of firm value: panel data evidence for Chilean firms. Rev Manag Sci 8, 575–604 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-013-0115-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-013-0115-3