Corporate governance, regulatory changes, and corporate restructuring in Korea, 1993–2004

What has triggered the big wave of corporate restructuring around the world since the 1980s? The dominant explanations have attributed it to the changes in corporate governance and business environments. Based on these research streams, we investigated the roles of governance factors, such as business group affiliation, domestic institutional ownership, and foreign ownership in corporate restructuring of Korean firms, and continued to examine the effects of changes in regulatory environments regarding corporate governance after the financial crisis. We argue that the effectiveness of governance factors on firms’ activities is bound to the institutional context created by government regulations. An empirical study was conducted on a panel of 251 Korean firms during 1993–2004. Results show that institutional ownership and regulatory changes in corporate governance had significantly influenced Korean firms’ restructuring. Regulatory changes have positively moderated the relationship between business group affiliation and restructuring, and between institutional ownership and restructuring.