公司现金储备和公司治理机制——基于中国上市公司的实证研究

基于转型经济环境下中国上市公司的截面数据,考察上市公司现金储备与公司治理机制的关系,发现作为公司治理机制重要内容的董事会治理结构、公司股权结构对公司的现金储备具有显著的影响,然而影响的作用方向却与对发达市场经济环境下公司现金储备行为的研究结论相反.这是因为在弱外部治理机制的经济条件下(不完善的接管市场和经理人市场,如中国),内部治理效力越差的公司倾向于持有较少的现金储备;而在强外部治理机制条件下(如美国)则刚好相反.公司治理效力的变量对公司现金储备水平的不同影响方向,正是由两种经济环境下作为代理人的公司管理者持有现金资产的成本收益构成的异质性造成的.

Corporate Cash Reserves and Corporate Governance Mechanism: The Empirical Study of the Chinese Publicly Traded Corporations

This paper,by presenting a sample of 254 firms from seven industries,tests the relation between corporate cash reserves and governance mechanism based on the cross-section data of publicly traded corporations in China.Findings show that the factors which affect the corporate cash reserves in developed countries also work on the ones in China.Whereas,these factors have opposite effects on the Chinese corporate cash reserves.On the base of the analysis of this phenomenon,we suggest that the different effects of variables are attributed to the difference of the composing of the cost and lucre of corporate cash reserves.In the perfect market economy,the motives of the precaution and the entrenchment effect of corporate cash reserves are more important to the agents than that to the ones in un-perfect market economy.The corporate managers in China care more about the current on-the-job consumption and prettifying performances through spending the cash reserves as quickly as possible.To sum up,the difference in the use of cash reserves is the major reason for the diverse effects of the agency problem.Furthermore,we show that Dittmar et al(2003)'s conclusion is wrong.The reason for why the corporate cash reserves is higher in poor-shareholder-protection countries than that in better-shareholder-protection countries is that the optimal cash balance under the condition of maximum shareholder's wealth is much lower in better-investor-protection countries.Contrarily,the agency problem diminishes the difference of corporate cash reserves level between the perfect and un-perfect market economy.