外文文献：
Capital structure, equity ownership and firm performance
Dimitris Margaritis, Maria Psillaki 1
Abstract：This paper investigates the relationship between capital structure, ownership structure and firm performance using a sample of French manufacturing firms. We employ non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods to empirically construct the industry’s ‘best practice’frontier and measure firm efficiency as the distance from that frontier. Using these performance measures we examine if more efficient firms choose more or less debt in their capital structure. We summarize the contrasting effects of efficiency on capital structure in terms of two competing hypotheses: the efficiency-risk and franchise value hypotheses. Using quantile regressions we test the effect of efficiency on leverage and thus the empirical validity of the two competing hypotheses across different capital structure choices. We also test the direct relationship from leverage to efficiency stipulated by the Jensen and Meckling (1976) agency cost model. Throughout this analysis we consider the role of ownership structure and type on capital structure and firm performance.
Firm performance, capital structure and ownership
Conflicts of interest between owners-managers and outside shareholders as well as those between controlling and minority shareholders lie at the heart of the corporate governance literature (Berle and Means, 1932; Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Shleifer and Vishny, 1986). While there is a relatively large literature on the effects of ownership on firm performance (see for example, Morck et al., 1988; McConnell and Servaes, 1990; Himmelberg et al., 1999), the relationship between ownership structure and capital structure remains largely unexplored. On the other hand, a voluminous literature is devoted to capital structure and its effects on corporate performance –see the surveys by Harris and Raviv (1991) and Myers (2001). An emerging consensus that comes out of the corporate governance literature (see Mahrt-Smith, 2005) is that the interactions between capital structure and ownership structure impact on firm values. Yet theoretical arguments alone cannot unequivocally predict these relationships (see Morck et al., 1988) and the empirical evidence that we have often appears to be contradictory. In part these conflicting results arise from difficulties empirical researchers face in obtaining direct measures of the magnitude of agency costs that are not confounded by factors that are beyond the control of management (Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti, 2006). In the remainder of this section we briefly review the literature in this area focusing on the main hypotheses of interest for this study.
Firm performance and capital structure
The agency cost theory is premised on the idea that the interests of the company’s managers and its shareholders are not perfectly aligned. In their seminal paper Jensen and Meckling (1976) emphasized the importance of the agency costs of equity arising from the separation of ownership and control of firms whereby managers tend to maximize their own utility rather than the value of the firm. These conflicts may occur in situations where managers have incentives to take excessive risks as part of risk shifting investment strategies. This leads us to Jensen’s (1986) “free cash flow theory”where as stated by Jensen (1986, p. 323) “the problem is how to motivate managers to disgorge the cash rather than investing it below the cost of capital or wasting it on organizational inefficiencies.”Thus high debt ratios may be used as a disciplinary device to
1来源：Journal of Banking & Finance , 2010 (34) : 621–632，本文翻译的是第二部分
reduce managerial cash flow waste through the threat of liquidation (Grossman and Hart, 1982) or through pressure to generate cash flows to service debt (Jensen, 1986). In these situations, debt will have a positive effect on the value of the firm.
Agency costs can also exist from conflicts between debt and equity investors. These conflicts arise when there is a risk of default. The risk of default may create what Myers (1977) referred to as an“underinvestment”or “debt overhang”problem. In this case, debt will have a negative effect on the value of the firm. Building on Myers (1977) and Jensen (1986), Stulz (1990) develops a model in which debt financing is shown to mitigate overinvestment problems but aggravate the underinvestment problem. The model predicts that debt can have both a positive and a negative effect on firm performance and presumably both effects are present in all firms. We allow for the presence of both effects in the empirical specification of the agency cost model. However we expect the impact of leverage to be negative overall. We summarize this in terms of our first testable hypothesis. According to the agency cost hypothesis (H1) higher leverage is expected to lower agency costs, reduce inefficiency and thereby lead to an improvement in firm’s performance.
Reverse causality from firm performance to capital structure
But firm performance may also affect the choice of capital structure. Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti (2006) stipulate that more efficient firms are more likely to earn a higher return for a given capital structure, and that higher returns can act as a buffer against portfolio risk so that more efficient firms are in a better position to substitute equity for debt in their capital structure. Hence under the efficiency-risk hypothesis (H2), more efficient firms choose higher leverage ratios because higher efficiency is expected to lower the costs of bankruptcy and financial distress. In essence, the efficiency-risk hypothesis is a spin-off of the trade-off theory of capital structure whereby differences in efficiency, all else equal, enable firms to fine tune their optimal capital structure.
It is also possible that firms which expect to sustain high efficiency rates into the future will choose lower debt to equity ratios in an attempt to guard the economic rents or franchise value generated by these efficiencies from the threat of liquidation (see Demsetz, 1973; Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti, 2006). Thus in addition to a equity for debt substitution effect, the relationship between efficiency and capital structure may also be characterized by the presence of an income effect. Under the franchise-value hypothesis (H2a) more efficient firms tend to hold extra equity capital and therefore, all else equal, choose lower leverage ratios to protect their future income or franchise value.
Thus the efficiency-risk hypothesis (H2) and the franchise-value hypothesis (H2a) yield opposite predictions regarding the likely effects of firm efficiency on the choice of capital structure. Although we cannot identify the separate substitution and income effects our empirical analysis is able to determine which effect dominates the other across the spectrum of different capital structure choices.
Ownership structure and the agency costs of debt and equity.
The relationship between ownership structure and firm performance dates back to Berle and Means (1932) who argued that widely held corporations in the US, in which ownership of capital is dispersed among small shareholders and control is concentrated in the hands of insiders tend to underperform. Following from this, Jensen and Meckling (1976) develop more formally the classical owner-manager agency problem. They advocate that managerial share-ownership may
reduce managerial incentives to consume perquisites, expropriate shareholders’wealth or to engage in other sub-optimal activities and thus helps in aligning the interests of managers and shareholders which in turn lowers agency costs. Along similar lines, Shleifer and Vishny (1986) show that large external equity holders can mitigate agency conflicts because of their strong incentives to monitor and discipline management.
In contrast Demsetz (1983) and Fama and Jensen (1983) point out that a rise in insider share-ownership stakes may also be associated with adverse ‘entrenchment’effects that can lead to an increase in managerial opportunism at the expense of outside investors. Whether firm value would be maximized in the presence of large controlling shareholders depends on the entrenchment effect (Claessens et al., 2002; Villalonga and Amit, 2006; Dow and McGuire, 2009). Several studies document either a direct (e.g., Shleifer and Vishny, 1986; Claessens et al., 2002; Hu and Zhou, 2008) or a non-monotonic (e.g., Morck et al., 1988; McConnell and Servaes, 1995; Davies et al., 2005) relationship between ownership structure and firm performance while others (e.g., Demsetz and Lehn, 1985; Himmelberg et al., 1999; Demsetz and Villalonga, 2001) find no relation between ownership concentration and firm performance.
Family firms are a special class of large shareholders with unique incentive structures. For example, concerns over family and business reputation and firm survival would tend to mitigate the agency costs of outside debt and outside equity (Demsetz and Lehn, 1985; Anderson et al., 2003) although controlling family shareholders may still expropriate minority shareholders (Claessens et al., 2002; Villalonga and Amit, 2006). Several studies (e.g., Anderson and Reeb, 2003a; Villalonga and Amit, 2006; Maury, 2006; King and Santor, 2008) report that family firms especially those with large personal owners tend to outperform non-family firms. In addition, the empirical findings of Maury (2006) suggest that large controlling family ownership in Western Europe appears to benefit rather than harm minority shareholders. Thus we expect that the net effect of family ownership on firm performance will be positive.
Large institutional investors may not, on the other hand, have incentives to monitor management (Villalonga and Amit, 2006) and they may even coerce with management (McConnell and Servaes, 1990; Claessens et al., 2002; Cornett et al., 2007). In addition, Shleifer and Vishny (1986) and La Porta et al. (2002) argue that equity concentration is more likely to have a positive effect on firm performance in situations where control by large equity holders may act as a substitute for legal protection in countries with weak investor protection and less developed capital markets where they also classify Continental Europe.
We summarize the contrasting ownership effects of incentive alignment and entrenchment on firm performance in terms of two competing hypotheses. Under the ‘convergence-of-interest hypothesis’(H3) more concentrated ownership should have a positive effect on firm performance. And under the ownership entrenchment hypothesis (H3a) the effect of ownership concentration on firm performance is expected to be negative.
The presence of ownership entrenchment and incentive alignment effects also has implications for the firm’s capital structure choice. We assess these effects empirically. As external blockholders have strong incentives to reduce managerial opportunism they may prefer to use debt as a governance mechanism to control management’s consumption of perquisites (Grossman and Hart, 1982). In that case firms with large external blockholdings are likely to have higher debt ratios at least up to the point where the risk of bankruptcy may induce them to lower debt. Family firms may also use higher debt levels to the extent that they are perceived to be less risky by
debtholders (Anderson et al., 2003). On the other hand the relation between leverage and insider share-ownership may be negative in situations where managerial blockholders choose lower debt to protect their non-diversifiable human capital and wealth invested in the firm (Friend and Lang, 1988). Brailsford et al. (2002) report a non-linear relationship between managerial share-ownership and leverage. At low levels of managerial ownership, agency conflicts necessitate the use of more debt but as managers become entrenched at high levels of managerial ownership they seek to reduce their risks and they use less debt. Anderson and Reeb (2003) find that insider ownership by managers or families has no effect on leverage while King and Santor (2008) report that both family firms and firms controlled by financial institutions carry more debt in their capital structure.
外文翻译：
资本结构、股权结构与公司绩效
摘要：本文通过对法国制造业公司的抽样调查，研究资本结构、所有权结构和公司绩效的关系。我们采用非参数的数据包络分析方法来实证构建行业“最佳惯例”边界，衡量公司绩效与这一边界的距离。利用这些性能指标，我们可以检验越高效率的公司在资本结构中选择越多的债务或者越少的债务。我们总结在以下两个相互竞争的假说下资本结构效率截然不同的影响：效率风险假说和特许权价值假说。利用分位数回归我们可以检测杠杆效率的影响和这两个相互竞争的假说对不同资本结构的选择上的实证效度。我们也可以通过詹森和麦考林的代理成本模型规定来检测杠杆和效率的直接关系。通过这个分析我们考虑所有权结构的作用和资本结构和公司绩效的类型。
公司绩效、资本结构与所有权
所有权经理人和外部股东以及控股股东和少数股东之间的利益冲突是公司治理文化的核心(Berle and Means, 1932; Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Shleifer and Vishny, 1986)。尽管有相当多的文献研究所有权对公司绩效的影响(例如，Morck 等, 1988; McConnell and Servaes, 1990; Himmelberg等, 1999)，但所有权结构与资本结构间的关系在很大程度上仍未发现。另一方面，大量的文献致力于资本结构和它对公司绩效的影响-- Harris and Raviv (1991) and Myers (2001)的研究，来自公司治理文献的新兴共识是资本结构和所有权结构影响公司价值的相互作用(Mahrt-Smith, 2005)。然而仅仅理论上的争论不能明确地预测这些关系(Morck 等, 1988)，经验证据表明似乎是矛盾的。在某种程度上这些冲突的结果来自于实证研究者面对的获得直接措施的代理成本的大小，不被管理成本之外的因素混淆(Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti, 2006)。在本节的剩余部分我们简要回顾这一领域的文献，焦点在于研究的主要假设前提。
公司绩效与资本结构
代理成本理论的前提是公司管理者和股东的利益不完全一致。Jensen and Meckling (1976)在他们的开创性论文中强调来自公司所有权与控制权分离的股权代理成本的重要性，管理者在意的是自身效用而不是公司价值的最大化。当管理者有动机将过多的风险转变成投资策略风险的情况下这些冲突就会发生。这就引出了Jensen的“自由现金流量理论”，Jensen (1986, p. 323)指出“问题是如何激励管理者流出现金而不是低于资金成本的投资或组织效率低下造成的浪费。”高负债率被当做是通过清算威胁减少管理者现金流浪费的纪律设备(Grossman and Hart, 1982)或者通过压力产生现金流量偿还债务(Jensen, 1986)。在这种情况下，债务对公司价值有积极的影响。
代理成本也存在于债务投资者和股权投资者的冲突中，这些冲突也来自于违约风险。Myers (1977)指出违约风险会造成“投资不足”或“债务负担”问题。在这种情况下，债务对公司价值有消极的影响。建立在Myers (1977)和Jensen (1986)的基础上，Stulz (1990)建立一个模型，债务融资被证明会缓解过度投资问题但是会加重投资不足问题。模型预测债务对公司绩效既有积极作用又有消极作用，推测这两种影响回在所有公司出现。我们允许代理成本模型存在实证规范的两个影响。然而我们期望杠杆作用是完全负面的。我们从第一个可检验假设得出结论。根据代理成本假设，高杠杆期望低的代理成本，减少低效率，因此导致公司绩效的改善。
资本结构与公司绩效的反向因果关系
公司绩效也会影响资本结构的选择，Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti (2006)规定效率越高的公司越有可能从给定的资本结构中获得更高的回报，高回报可以作为一对组合风险的缓冲，因此高效率的公司在资本结构上以一个更好的位置用股权代替债权。Hence根据效率风险假
说，高效率的公司选择较高的杠杆比率因为高效率期望降低破产成本和财务困境。从本质上说，效率风险假说是资本结构权衡理论的一个剥离，其中效率不同，其他条件都相等，允许公司调节最优资本结构。
期望将来维持高效率的公司会选择降低债务与权益比率，尝试控制由清算威胁效率产生的经济租金或特许权价值(Demsetz, 1973; Berger and Bonaccorsi di Patti, 2006)。除了公平的债务替代效应，效率与资本结构间的关系也可以被描述成收入效应的存在。根据特许权价值假说，高效率公司倾向于持有额外股本，在其他条件相同的情况下，选择较低的杠杆比率来保护未来收入和特许权价值。
效率风险假说和特许权价值假说反向预测关于公司效率在资本结构上的选择，尽管我们不能识别影响实证分析的单独替代和收入可以决定主导不同资本结构的选择范围。
所有制结构与债务和权益的代理成本
所有制结构和公司绩效的关系追溯到Berle and Means (1932)，他指出在美国被广泛持有的公司的资本所有权分散在小股东和控股股东之间，集中在内部人手中的公司表现不佳。这之后Jensen and Meckling (1976)发现更多正式传统所有者经理的代理问题。他们主张管理股份所有权会减少管理激励消耗额外补贴，剥夺股东的财富或从事其他次优活动，有助于调整管理者和股东之间的利益，从而降低代理成本。沿着类似的路线，Shleifer and Vishny (1986)表明外部大股东因为他们监督和纪律管理的强大动力可以缓解代理冲突。
与此相反，Demsetz (1983) 、Fama 和Jensen (1983)指出内部股份所有权的增加可以与不良“防御”影响联系在一起，它可以牺牲外部投资者导致管理机会主义的增加。依靠“防御”效果大量控股股东的存在会使公司价值的最大化(Claessens等, 2002; Villalonga and Amit, 2006; Dow and McGuire, 2009)。几个学术研究指出所有制结构与公司绩效的关系是直接(Shleifer and Vishny, 1986; Claessens 等, 2002; Hu and Zhou, 2008)或者非单调(Morcketal., 1988; McConnell and Servaes, 1995; Davies 等, 2005)，而其他研究发现所有制结构与公司绩效之间没关系(Demsetz and Lehn, 1985; Himmelberg 等, 1999; Demsetz and Villalonga, 2001)。
家族企业是大股东和独特的激励结构特殊的一类。例如，关心家庭、商业信誉和企业的生存，倾向于减轻外部债务和外部权益的代理成本(Demsetz and Lehn, 1985; Anderson等, 2003)，尽管控股家族股东依旧会侵吞中小股东(Claessens等, 2002; Villalonga and Amit, 2006)。几个研究指出家族企业尤其是大型个人所有者倾向于超越非家族企业。另外，Maury (2006)的实证结果说明西欧大型家庭控股所有制似乎有利于而不是损耗少数股东。我们期望家庭所有制对公司绩效的影响作用是正相关的。
大型机构投资者相反有动力监督管理(Villalonga and Amit, 2006)，甚至是强迫与管理(McConnell and Servaes, 1990; Claessens等, 2002; Cornett等, 2007)。另外，Shleifer and Vishny (1986) and La Porta 等(2002)指出股权集中度在大股东控制的情形下对公司绩效有积极的影响，扮演一国对弱投资者和不发达欧洲大陆资本市场法律保护的替代者。
我们在两个相互竞争的假设条件下总结激励调整和巩固的对比所有权对公司绩效的影响。根据“利益收敛假说”，比较集中的所有权对公司绩效有积极的影响。而在“所有权防御假说”下，所有权集中对公司绩效的影响是负相关的。
所有权预测和激励调整的存在对公司资本结构的选择也有影响。我们用实证分析这些影响。因为外部大股东对减少管理机会主义有强烈的激励作用，他们也许更喜欢使用债务作为治理机制来控制管理层额外补贴的消耗(Grossman and Hart, 1982)。在这种情况下，有大量外部股权的公司可能拥有负债率至少达到破产风险降低债务的最高点。家族企业也许会将高负债率水平控制在他们认为是较少受到债权人风险的程度(Anderson等, 2003)。另一方面，当管理大股东选择低债务来保护他们非分散的人力资本和公司投资财富时，杠杆作用和内部股东之间的关系也许是负相关的(Friend and Lang, 1988)。Brailsford等(2002)发现管理股东
和杠杆效率非线性关系。管理层持股的低水平下，代理冲突迫使使用更多的债务，但是当管理者确立高层次管理权时他们会寻求减少风险，并且使用较少的债务。Anderson and Reeb (2003)发现内部管理者或家族持股对财务杠杆率没有作用，而King and Santor (2008)却说家族企业和金融机构控制公司会给资本结构带来更多的债务。