• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.21-32
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• 2017

Motivated by the recent cases of negligent social responsibility as manifested by foreign luxury fashion brands in Korea, this study investigates whether agency costs depend on the sustainability of different types of corporate governance. Agency costs refer either to vertical costs arising from the relationship between stockholders and managers, or to horizontal costs associated with the potential conflicts between majority and minority stockholders. The firms with luxury fashion brand could spend large sums of money on maintenance of magnificent brand image, thereby increasing the agency cost. On the contrary, the firms may hold down wasteful spending to report a gaudily financial achievement. This results in mitigation of the agency cost. Agency costs are measured by the value of the principal component. First, three ratios are constructed: asset turnover, operating expense to sales, and earnings before interest, tax, and depreciation. Then, the scores of each of these ratios for individual firms in the sample are differenced from the ratios for the benchmark firm of S-OIL. S-OIL was designated as the best superior governance model firm for 2013 by CGS. We perform regression analysis of each agency cost index, luxury fashion brand dummy and a set of control variables. The regression results indicate that the agency costs of the firms with luxury fashion brand exceed those of control group in the fashion industry in the part of operating expenses, but the agency cost falls short of those of control group in the part of EBITD, thus the aggregate agency costs are not differential of those of the control group. In sensitivity test, the results are same that the agency cost of the firms are higher than those of the matching control group with PSM(propensity matching method). These results are corroborated by an additional analysis comparing the group of the companies with the best brands with the control group. The results raise doubts about the effectiveness of management of the firms with luxury fashion brand. This study has a limitation that the research has performed only for 2013 and this paper suggests that there is room for improvement in the current research methodology.