earticle

영어

This paper examines how the stock price of publicly traded firms is related to the investment decisions made by private firms in the same industry. As a readily observable measure of common economic fundamentals, the stock price of public firms can help private firms learn about their growth options and it can also facilitate their capital-raising by helping communicate with outside capital providers. Using data from Korea for the period of 2000-2013, we find that private firms invest more, the higher is the stock-market valuation of their public industry peers. Such a positive relationship is more pronounced when the cashflows of private firms are negative and the public peers are limited to a group of small-sized companies that are particularly comparable to private firms—namely, the KOSDAQ-listed companies. We also find that the external capital-raising by private firms is positively related to the stock price of public peers, especially to the stock price of the KOSDAQ-listed peers and when the cashflows of private firms are negative. Our results are consistent with the notion that, when private firms lack internal funds and need to raise funds externally, the stock-market valuation of related public companies facilitates their capital-raising by making available relevant information to outside capital providers. We find only limited support for the learning channel.