earticle

영어

The importance of a firm’s innovation is emphasized because the innovation can promote not only a firm’s competitiveness but also viability(Park, Park, and Cho, 2006; Jeon and Lee, 2015). However, in Korea, little literature has been explored the relationship between firms’ innovation and cost of debt capital. Therefore, we investigate the effects of innovation on the cost of debt capital by using KOSPI-listed companies. In addition, we examine if there are any differences in the relationships between innovation and cost of debt capital when companies belong to the high-tech or non-high-tech industries. We also analyze how the interaction term between innovation and pay equality can affect the cost of debt. This paper proxies the level of a firm’s innovation by using the number of granted patents. For this, we collect patent data from KIPRIS(Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service) of the Korean Intellectual Property Office. As a proxy of firm’s innovation level, the patent data could be more suitable than research and development expenditure data because the granted patents can be recognized as the output of innovation activities(Choi, 2018). The main results can be summarized into three parts. First, in our regression, the number of granted patents as a proxy of innovation has a negative effect on the debt cost which shows that more innovative company has a lower cost of debt. It also implies that a firm’s innovation activities could be recognized positively by creditors. These findings are also robust when we use a two-stage least squares regression model, pooled OLS regression model, and random effects model. Our results are consistent with Hsu, Lee, Liu, and Zhang(2015) which investigates the effect of innovation on the cost of capital using the United States data. Second, in high-tech industry, the acquiring patent rights is one of the key factors for surviving. Thus, we split the sample into high and non-high-tech industry groups. The results show that the coefficient of innovation is significant in the high-tech industry, but not in the non-high-tech industry. These findings imply that bond investors may think that the innovation is more important for high-tech firms than non-high-tech firms. Third, in high-tech industry, the coefficient of pay equality is positive and the coefficient of interaction term between innovation and pay equality is significantly negative. The pay equality variable takes the value of one if manager-employee pay gap ratio is equal or less than the median, and zero otherwise. In summary, this study finds that the firm’s innovation has a positive effect on the cost of debt capital and this relation is significant when the firms belong to high-tech industry, not in non-high tech industry. We also find that, in high-tech industry, the pay equality of manager-employee may increase the cost of debt capital but a firm’s innovation activities can reduce the negative effects of pay equality. These findings provide useful information and make contributions not only for high-tech firms’ managers but also for innovation policy makers.

한국어

본 연구는 기업의 혁신과 타인자본비용의 관계를 살펴보는데 목적을 두고 있다. 또한 본고는 첨단산업과 비첨단산업에서 이들 관계가 상이하게 나타나는지 분석한다. 이 외에도 본 연구는 혁신과 보상평등의 교차변수를 활용해 동 변수와 타인자본비용의 관련성을 검증한다. 이를 위해 본고는 특허청의 특허정보검색서비스를 통해 유가증권시장 상장기업의 특허자료를 수집하여 분석에 사용하였다. 분석결과 첫째, 혁신의 대용변수로 사용된 등록 특허건수와 타인자본비용 사이에는 유의한 부(-)의 관련성이 조사되었다. 이러한 결과는 혁신활동이 활발한 기업일수록 타인자본비용이 낮게 나타남을 보여주며, 이는 타인자본 제공자인 채권자들이 기업의 혁신을 긍정적으로 인식하고 있음을 시사한다. 둘째, 혁신에 따른 타인자본비용 감소효과는 첨단산업에서 유의하게 나타난 반면, 비첨단산업에서는 동 효과가 확인되지 않았다. 셋째, 보상평등 변수의 부호는 첨단 및 비첨단산업에서 모두 정(+)으로 나타났으나, 혁신과 보상평등의 교차항은 첨단산업에서만 유의미한 부(-)의 값을 가졌다. 이러한 결과는 경영진-종업원의 낮은 보상차이가 타인자본비용 상승을 초래할 수 있으나, 혁신활동이 활발한 첨단기업의 경우 이러한 부정적 영향이 감소될 수 있음을 보여준다.