The financing market accessibility is an important factor to consider when investigating firms’ financing choices. However, many studies on the capital structure adjustment speed, derived from traditional capital structure theories, have largely ignored the importance of financing market accessibility especially when they investigate the speed toward the target debt ratio. Thus, this paper investigates the role of financing market accessibility in the process for a firm to adjust their debt ratio to its target debt ratio. Since Modigliani and Miller suggested irrelevance proposition regarding the relationship between leverage and firm value in 1958 (Modigliani and Miller, 1958), many researchers have raised the question about the validity of the argument. Initially, they questioned whether the Modigliani and Miller’s irrelevance proposition is well supported by the available firms’ data and whether the imperfections of capital market make firm value links to debt ratio. A trade off theory was created on the basis of the latter case, claiming that a firm would select a target debt ratio by taking into consideration both costs and benefits of the debts. While Modigliani and Miller (1963) suggested a correction theory about irrelevance proposition, Baxter (1967) presented the bankruptcy cost theory arguing that the increase of the expected bankruptcy costs could countervail the tax shield of debt as the debt ratio increases. Jensen and Meckling (1976) showed the optimal debt ratio could be influenced by the agency cost occurring because stockholders entrust managers with the firm’s management. Since Modigliani nd Miller’s correction theory (Modigliani and Miller, 1963), the trade off theory developed by many researchers suggest that the optimal capital structural is determined by the relationship (trade off) between cost and benefit of using of debts. Survey result suggested by Graham and Harvey (2001) shows that 81% of 392 firms indeed consider a target debt ratio (or range) an important factor when they make their financing decisions. However, Myers (1984) refutes this trade off theory of capital structure with an updated version of Donaldson’s (1961) pecking order theory, according to which asymmetric information leads managers to believe that the market generally underprices their shares (Flannery and Rangan, 2006). As a result, a firm’s investment is financed first with internal funds before the firm gets into debt if internally generated funds are not sufficient, and equity financing is used only as a last choice of financing instrument. In a pecking order theory, the observed firm’s leverage shows primarily the result of a firm’s historical profitability and investment opportunities. Firms have no strong preferences about their debt ratios and no obvious propensity toward adjusting leverage alteration caused by financing needs or operating profit (loss). Other theories about capital structure also do not support the view of timely convergence toward a target debt ratio. Baker and Wurgler (2002) argue that a firm’s observed debt ratio shows its cumulative ability to catch the opportunity which equity shares are highly evaluated; that is, stock prices fluctuate around their true values, and managers tend to issue shares when the firm’s market-to-book ratio is high (Flannery and Rangan, 2006). This market timing theory, on the other hand, argues that a firm’s manager continuously takes the advantage of information asymmetries to benefit current shareholders. Thus, this theory suggests, like the pecking order hypothesis, that there is no reversion to a target debt ratio if market timing is the dominant determinant on firm’s leverage. The pecking order and market timing theories suggest that firms’ managers, generally not aware of any leverage effect on firm value, do not endeavor to modify changes in leverage. On the other hand, the tradeoff theory of capital structure implies that the factors of market imperfection can damage both leverage and firm value, thereby forcing firms to take management initiatives to offset deviations from their optimal debt ratios (Flannery and Rangan, 2006). Thus, estimating the adjustment speed of capital structure could be an important first step in verifying conflicting theories of capital structure. Using manufacturing firms listed on Korean security markets from Jan. 1, 2001 to Dec. 31, 2008, this study analyses the relationship between financing market accessibility and capital structure adjustment speed toward target debt ratio. This paper shows that the capital structure adjustment speed overall increases when the debt and equity financing market accessibility is good. This result holds regardless of the use of book and market debt ratio as dependent variable. Furthermore, firms can adjust their leverage toward the target faster when they have good equity financing market accessibility than debt financing market accessibility. These results suggest that financing market accessibility is the crucial determinant of capital structure adjustment speed, and this finding should shed important light into ways for policy makers to support firms’ smooth debt and equity financing.

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The protection of environment in parallel with firms’ sustainable growth has never been such an important issue as it has become today when the environmental damages have begun to threaten the global ecosystem and the survival of many plants and animals including human beings. Evidently, increasing consumption and mass production of goods to satisfy incessant consumption needs are the most significant culprit of environmental damages. Therefore, companies must take responsibilities by changing their production processes and establish procedures to control the pollution created by their production processes. But firms would not initiate such environmental management activities unless they are certain of the positive effects of incorporating environmental elements in the company management since the major goal of firms is to maximize the profit. With this issue in mind, we attempt to provide a scientific evidence that is related to the environmental management of companies. Specifically, we investigate the effect of environmental management on firm value based on the sample of firms that received the National Environmental Management Award. This award was initiated by the Korean government in 1999 and is now the most prestigious prize in the environmental management area. It has been given to firms that invest a significant portion of their resources on the environmental activities. In order to win the Grand Prize the firm must have the records of continuous environmental management activities for at least three years. As such, these firms can serve as a good proxy for the better environmental management. The environmental management could have both positive and negative impacts on firm value. Typically, firms must spend a substantial amount of capital to install and implement the pollutant control, and it is definitely a cost factor in the short-run. However, the environmental management enables firms to upgrade their corporate image as a good global citizen, which can contribute to a sales increase. It also makes firms reduce the unnecessary or marginal inputs in the manufacturing process which can lead to a decrease in production costs. Or under the circumstances wherein many countries and regions strengthen the regulation on environmental protection, the environmental management could be especially effective in preventing costly environmental lawsuits that may occur when a company ignores the environmental factors. These long-term effects will have a positive influence on firm value. Therefore, the overall impact of the environmental management must be measured by an empirical investigation. In this regard, our OLS regression results indicate that firms with significant environmental management activities have a higher Tobin’s q value. Thus, we conclude that the environmental management activities by firms are not a waste of resources but actually contribute to the improvement of firm value. However, the positive relationship between environmental activities and the firm value could be spurious, since there could exist the endogeneity problem in the underlying process. In other words, it is possible that the firms with a higher value could engage in environmental management since they have resources to invest in such activities, not the other way around. In order to control the confounding effects caused by endogeneity among variables, we employ three different methods when analyzing the impact of environmental management on firm value. First, we control the firm fixed effects in panel data analysis to eliminate the possibility that the unobserved firm characteristics may generate spurious results. Second, we estimate the simultaneous equation model with two dependent variables where one of the endogenous dependent variables is a dummy variable that is also an independent variable employed to explain the other continuous dependent variable. Third, we examine the difference in firm value increase between environmental management firms and control firms by the difference-in-difference test. The difference-in-difference method allows us to observe the increase of firm value caused purely by the environmental management after controlling for the firm value changes over time and the firm value difference without environmental management. Even after controlling the endogeneity problem we obtain the results that environmental management has a strong positive relationship with firm value and the increase in firm value is economically significant. We also examine the characteristics of the firms engaging in environmental management. The results indicate that the environmental management firms are bigger in terms of total assets and sales. Most of them are also members of the 10 biggest chaebol groups and other remaining business groups that are subject to the regulation on shareholdings in other domestic companies. Since the environmental management often requires a huge amount of capital expenditure, these companies can reap the benefit of economies of scale in this regard. Then, it is understandable that bigger firms can more easily employ environmental management while, in fact, most of bigger firms are chaebol firms. Further, they should have an additional incentive to engage in environmental management, which is to countervail the negative publicity of chaebol as a whole. In addition, we find that environmental management firms spend more on advertisement and R&D and have a higher profitability and a larger cash flow from operating activities compared to the firms in control group. We conjecture that profitable firms with high cash flows are better positioned to perform environmental management since they have more resources to allocate on environmental activities. However, environmental management firms in general have shorter business histories and higher fixed debt ratios.

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This paper explores the impact of multidimensional uncertainty on people’s incentives to acquire information using the Kyle model of informed trading. In a single period Kyle model, the informed trader is worse off if he acquires information (called non-fundamental information) about the level of noise trading. This is due to the fact that the informed trader, by betting against noise traders, reduces the variance of the total noise related trading; he gains from such a bet, but loses part of profits from fundamental trading. If there is a speculator who trades only on non-fundamental information, the informed trader is better off acquiring information that is dominated by the speculator’s whereas acquiring non-fundamental information that is not dominated could make the informed trader worse off than without such information. Moreover, the informed trader is much better off sharing such dominated information with the speculator after acquiring it. When there are two traders who have fundamental information, the less informed trader has stronger incentives to acquire non-fundamental information. We also show that non-fundamental information provides a better return if the noise trading has a bigger variance than the asset value. The overall picture emerging from this exercise is that traders who focus on fundamentals do not have strong incentives to acquire non-fundamental information.

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