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Reputation Effects on Corporate Finance

For the past half a century, there has been progressive development in corporate finance theories, and among these, corporate financial decisions have been attracting the attention of outsiders. As the outsiders¡¦ learning process of the firm¡¦s private information determines the firm¡¦s value, managers who are concerned with outsiders¡¦ perceptions of their firms try to enhance their firms¡¦ short-term reputation through their financial decisions. However, up to this date, few reputation models have been applied to predict these financial decisions.
Three corporate finance issues are involved to identify the reputation effects on corporate finance: (1) convertible bond call policies, (2) IPO decisions and activities, and (3) corporate financing policies. As for the first issue, this study constructs a two-period reputation model of a convertible bond call policy. This model concludes that in equilibrium, a firm with bad management quality and a bad reputation chooses to call, while a firm with good management quality or of a good reputation builds up it reputation by not calling the convertible bonds. This is consistent with the signaling theory proposed by Harris and Raviv (1985). However, the reputation model here identifies the call policy as a reputation-building mechanism rather than being only a signaling role, and suggests that the reputation rents resolve the discrepancies of the stock¡¦s post-call price performance.
As for the IPO decisions and activities, this study performs another reputation model to analyze a firm¡¦s reputation effects on IPO activities, especially on the decision to go public. The results yield that a firm¡¦s reputation does affect its decision to go public. By listing equities publicly, firms with good management quality and a solid past would anticipate enhancing their reputations, and those with a poor past would anticipate building up good names. Furthermore, good reputation firms with bad management quality would anticipate maintaining their reputations by going public. On the other hand, it is found that good firms over-invest in building up their reputations and bad firms take advantage of their reputations to go public. Both result in firms¡¦ over-going public and IPO mispricing. This constitutes an alternative interpretation on IPOs¡¦ long-run underperformance and the sharp decline of the survival rate.
As for the corporate financing policies, the other reputation model is constructed by taking both determinants, the costs of financial distress as well as the firm¡¦s reputation into consideration. The results show that good management quality firms with good reputations enjoy their financial flexibility between debt and equity. Bad management quality firms take advantage of their good names to issue equities, which leads to over investment. Good management firms lose their financial accesses due to bad reputations, which lead to under investment. Reputations would screen the bad management quality firms with bad reputations off the market.
This dissertation concludes that reputations indeed affect the three selected corporate financial decisions and suggests further plow on more corporate finance issues.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0130108-110225
Date30 January 2008
CreatorsChen, Yu-Fen
ContributorsVictor, W. Liu, David, So-De Hsyu, Chun-An Li, Roger, C. Y. Chen, Anlin Chen, Jen-Jsung Huang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0130108-110225
Rightswithheld, Copyright information available at source archive

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