Agency Costs and Ownership Structure

Abstract

We provide measures of absolute and relative equity agency costs for corporations under different ownership and management structures. Our base case is Jensen and Meckling's~1976! zero agency-cost firm, where the manager is the firm's sole shareholder. We utilize a sample of 1,708 small corporations from the FRB0NSSBF database and find that agency costs~i! are significantly higher when an outsider rather than an insider manages the firm;~ii! are inversely related to the manager's ownership share;~iii! increase with the number of nonmanager shareholders, and~iv! to a lesser extent, are lower with greater monitoring by banks.THE SOCIAL AND PRIVATE COSTS OF AN AGENT'S ACTIONS due to incomplete alignment of the agent's and owner's interests were brought to attention by the seminal contributions of Jensen and Meckling~1976! on agency costs. Agency theory has also brought the roles of managerial decision rights and various external and internal monitoring and bonding mechanisms to the forefront of theoretical discussions and empirical research. Great strides have been made in demonstrating empirically the role of agency costs in financial decisions, such as in explaining the choices of capital structure, maturity structure, dividend policy, and executive compensation. However, the actual measurement of the principal variable of interest, agency costs, in both absolute and relative terms, has lagged behind.To measure absolute agency costs, a zero agency-cost base case must be observed to serve as the reference point of comparison for all other cases of ownership and management structures. In the original Jensen and Meckling agency theory, the zero agency-cost base case is, by definition, the firm owned solely by a single owner-manager. When management owns less than 100 percent of the firm's equity, shareholders incur agency costs resulting from management's shirking and perquisite consumption. Because of limitations imposed by personal wealth constraints, exchange regulations on the minimum numbers of shareholders, and other considerations, no publicly traded firm is entirely owned by management. Thus, Jensen and Meckling's zero agency cost base case cannot be found among the usual sample of publicly

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