Three essays on ownership issues in corporate finance dissertation
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Date
2022-07-31
Authors
Wang, Yuan
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Abstract
The study consists of three research topics about corporate ownership and financial issues. Existing literature focuses on overall corporate ownership structure. This study extends the existing literature by studying the impacts of different ownership types. Different types of shareholders are different in several key aspects such as investment policies, targets, and risk preference, all of which influence how they execute their screening role over the companies, and are important determinants of firms’ decisions. To the extant literature, scholars have employed various perspectives to examine corporate ownership. In this study, I will be focusing on the behavior agency theory, agency theory, and socioemotional wealth theory, in the hope of bringing a more nuanced insight of the impacts of different corporate ownership on financial issues, such as, cost of bank loan, the formation of international joint venture, and CEO turnover.
In the first essay, I employ a sample of U.S. public companies between 2007 and 2016 to explore the joint effects of executive inside debt (EID) and family involvement on the cost of bank loans. The empirical results indicate that the mitigating effect of EID on the cost of bank loans is attenuated for family firms. In addition, I provide evidence for the following: 1) the mitigating effect of EID on cost of debt is strengthened when a firm’s performance is lower than its aspiration level and 2) the moderating effect of family involvement is significant when firm performance is above its aspiration level. Collectively, our findings support the behavioral agency prediction that family involvement shapes firms’ risk-taking preference, which acts as a substitute for EID in decreasing the cost of debt.
In the second essay, I examine whether family involvement in business affects firms’ engagement in international joint ventures (IJVs). Building on the narrow framing perspective, I argue that family businesses are more prone to utilize risk diversifying strategies over multiple IJV choices than non-family firms, because the family firms’ decisions tend to be broadly-framed. Examining the interaction between three IJV decisions (type of IJV, choice of host country, and number of partners) in a sample of 1,439 IJVs formed by publicly traded companies in the US, we found support for our predictions.
In the third essay, I explore how institutional holding together with other finance factors affect the likelihood of CEO turnover and whether analyst forecast accuracy serves as a mechanism through which institutional holding influences the likelihood of CEO turnover. I find that increased institutional shareholding results in a lower likelihood of CEO turnover directly as well as indirectly (through the mechanism of analyst forecast accuracy). We also investigate the impact of CEO turnover on subsequent firm performance using market-based measures, including firm value and the cost of equity. Moreover, we examine whether different types of CEO turnover would make a difference on firm value and cost of equity. Our results reveal that after CEO turnover—especially when the previous CEO is forced to leave, and the successor is from outside the company—the firm value is higher, and the cost of equity is lower.
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Keywords
Ownership Issues, Corporate Finance, Cost of Debt, International Joint Venture, CEO turnover