Capital structure in South Korea: a quantile regression approach

Knowledge of how South Korean firms choose their capital structures has particular value due to the country's specific corporate structure and the role of leverage in the evolution of its financial crisis of 1997 and recovery. Using a large panel for the years 1992-2001, we investigate the evolution and determinants of Korean firms' capital structure and focus on differences between firms in different quantiles of the debt-capital distribution. Conditional quantile regressions show that while variables associated with standard models of asymmetric information costs are significant throughout the distribution, there are considerable differences, including differences in sign, in their impact on firms with different degrees of leverage. Those observed nonlinearities in the determinants of capital structure are consistent with a model of capital structure that includes both costs resulting from asymmetric information and an upper bound on the debt-capital ratio.