Research Article
Management Transparency and Constraint of Financing
1 Andong National University, 2 Kwandong University, 3 Hanwha Life Insurance
Published: January 2012 · Vol. 16, No. 4 · pp. 231-251
Full Text
Abstract
This paper examines whether transparency of management is associated with constraint to finance of korean companies. The thesis of this paper is that firms that behave fairly and transparently in making accounting information and operating decision face fewer capital constraints. This is due to several reason. First, firms with higher transparency of management are directly linked to better stakeholder engagement, in other words, superior stakeholder engagement may directly limit the likelihood of opportunistic behavior by reducing overall contracting costs. Second, firms with higher transparency of management are likely to disclose their activities to the market to signal their long-term focus and differentiate themselves. Therefore, the increased availability of data about the firm reduces informational asymmetries between the firm and investors, leading to lower capital constraints. To investigate the impact that transparency of management has on capital constraints, we perform the regression analysis using korean listing companies. The dependent variable of interest is the KZ index, first advocated by Kaplan and Zingales(1997) and subsequently used extensively by scholars as a measure of capital constraints. We use the transparent management score calculated by korean accounting association as transparency of management. Our empirical findings confirm that firms with higher transparency of management face lower capital constraints. We also disaggregate transparency of management into its three components to gain insight as to which pillars have the greatest impact on capital constraints. We find that the result is driven primarily by audit report transparency. We test the robustness of the result, by using 2-stage least squares method, and we find similar results. We test again to compare prior studies about the relationship between income transparency and cost of capital, by substituting the KZ index with cost of capital, to proxy for capital constraints, we find similar results.
