Corporate finance theory generally recognizes lease as a type of liability, while lease is different from ordinary liability in that it can be used only as a means of raising capital for buying assets. And when the lessor evaluates the value of tax sh ...
Corporate finance theory generally recognizes lease as a type of liability, while lease is different from ordinary liability in that it can be used only as a means of raising capital for buying assets. And when the lessor evaluates the value of tax shields arising from leased assets higher than the lessee, the tax shields can be transferred from the lessee to the lessor, which is not the case for the ordinary liability. These points say that empirical studies on the factors affecting the use of lease are needed, apart from those on the factors affecting the use of debt. But it is almost impossible to find prior studies focusing on this topic in Korea.
There are only a few existing studies about lease in Korea, which were mainly interested in the effects of lease type choice on financial statements, and so didn't focus on factors affecting firms' total level of lease including both capital lease and operating lease. Besides, they didn't consider other various nontax factors, didn't use the marginal tax rate explicitly for reflecting tax burden, didn't cover sufficient sample of firms, and therefore their test results seem to be hard to generalize. Based on this situation, this paper performs empirical study for the KSE-listed companies on tax and nontax factors affecting a firm's decision on lease use and lease type choice.
Main test results from the regression analysis, the t-test and the logit analysis are as follows. First, firms with the higher marginal tax rate, higher management ownership, higher expected cost of financial distress, and more free cash flow show the significantly higher level of lease. And firms with the higher profitability, more investment opportunity, and higher debt ratio show the significantly lower level of lease.
Second, firms with the larger size, more investment opportunity and more free cash flow strongly prefer capital lease to operating lease. And, although the statistical significance is not so high, firms with the higher marginal tax rate and lower management ownership prefer capital lease to operating lease. But, contrary to the original expectation, firms with the higher debt ratio prefer capital lease to operating lease.