代理成本和股权结构外文翻译（可编辑）.doc

代理成本和股权结构外文翻译 外文翻译Agency Costs and Ownership Structure Material Source: THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE ?VOL.LV,NO.1?FEBRUARY 2000 page83-87 Author: JAMES S. ANG, REBEL A. COLE, and JAMES WUH LIN I. Agency Costs among Small Businesses When compared to publicly traded firms, small businesses come closest to the type of firms depicted in the stylized theoretical model of agency costs developed by Jensen and Meckling1976. At one extreme of ownership and management structures are firms whose managers own 100 percent of the firm. These firms, by their definition, have no agency costs. At the other extreme are firms whose managers are paid employees with no equity in the firm. In between are firms where the managers own some, but not all, of their firm’s equity. Agency costs arise when the interests of the firm’s managers are not aligned with those of the firm’s owners, and take the form of preference for on-the-job perks, shirking, and making self-interested and entrenched decisions that reduce shareholder wealth. The magnitude of these costs is limited by how well the owners and delegated third parties, such as banks, monitor the actions of the outside managers. To illustrate, consider those firms where a single owner controls 100 percent of the stock but hires an outsider to manage the business. On the one hand, agency costs may be small because the sole owner can internalize all monitoring costs and has the right to hire and fire the manager. More specifically, such an owner incurs 100 percent of the monitoring costs and receives 100 percent of the resulting benefits. On the other hand, the sole owner may not be able to monitor perfectly for the same reasons that he or she hired an outside manager, such as lack of time or ability. Owners of small firms typically lack financial sophistication, and may not be capable of performing random audits or fully understanding the operating or financial results. Consequently, these firms incur residual agency costs. If these costs are significant, they must reflect a failure of the owner’s monitoring activities. Potential explanations for this failure are lax monitoring by the owners and the lack of an adequate monitoring technology available for the owners. In this case, the separation of the management function initiation and implementation versus the control function by nonmanaging owners/shareholders ratification and monitoring, as suggested by Fama and Jensen 1983a, 1983b, may not be complete or effective. Thus, residual agency costs are still expected in a sole owner firm when the manager is an outsider. Agency costs attributable to the divergence of interests vary inversely with the manager’s ownership stake. As the number of shareholders increases from one, the ownership of the owner/manager falls to α, where 0 ≤ α 1. Because the manager gains 100 percent of each dollar spent on perks, but only α percent of each dollar in firm profit, the manager who owns less than 100 percent of the firm has the incentive to consume perks rather than to imize the value of the firm to all shareholders. At the extreme is the manager with zero ownership α 0, who gains 100 percent of perquisite consumption, but zero percent of firm profits in the case when salary is independent of firm performance. Aggregate expenditure on monitoring by the nonmanaging shareholders decreases as their individual ownership shares decline. This is due to the well-known free-rider problem in spending for quasi-public goods, such as monitoring effort. Each monitoring shareholder, with ownership λi must incur 100 percent of the monitoring costs, but realizes only λi percent of the monitoring benefits (in the form of reduced agency costs). A nonmonitoring shareholder, however, enjoys the full benefits of a monitoring shareholder’s activity without incurring any monitoring cost. Thus, as the number of nonmanager shareholders increases, aggregate expenditure on monitoring declines, and the magnitude of owner-manager agency-cost problems increases. Offsetting this relationship are concerns among shareholders about an increase in the probability that the firm will be unable to pay off bank debt or secure future financing from the same or new investors, which may produce some restraint in agency behavior. However, as noted by Williams 1987, these countervailing forces to agency behavior are expected to decline in effectiveness when the firm is not in imminent danger of insolvency To summarize, against the null hypothesis that agency costs are independent of the ownership and control structure,1 we postulate the following hypotheses derived from agency theory when compared to the base case: iagency costs are higher at firms whose managers own none of the firm’s equity, ii agency costs are an inverse function of the managers’ ownership stake, and iii agency costs are an increasing function of the number of nonmanager shareholders. II. Data Our e。