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Stein(1992) argues that corporate may use convertible bonds as a “backdoor” to get equity into their capital structures when adverse-selection problems makes a conventional stock issue unattractive. However, the highly simplified model can not explain the situation that higher-quality firms mimic lower-quality firms offering equity or convertible bonds. This paper correct the assumption of financial distress costs in Stein(1992)’s model. We believe that mimicking is possible because the costs of financial distress should not be constant when the firms select different financing instrument, and then we can achieve an efficient separating equilibrium and five pooling equilibrium. According to the extension version of the model, financing through convertible security did not solely pertain to medium firm. It is impossible to restrain the mimicking behavior of firms when the financial distress cost is too low or the expected benefit of mimicking over the perceived cost. We collect 106 issuance of convertible security from 1990 and refer to Bhabra & Patel (1996) in categorizing mimicking firms from non-mimicking ones. The empirical results state briefly below : 1、The issuing terms, namely convertible ratio, premium ratio, and coupon rate, of the mimicking versus non-mimicking firms are not significantly differ from each other. 2、The profitability indicators (i.e. ROA, ROE, and EPS), and the measurements of growth potential (R&D ratio, sales growth ratio, EBIT growth ratio) of non-mimicking firms are significantly higher than those of mimicking ones. However, the price and P/B of the former is significantly lower than those of the latter. The cumulative abnormal returns of non-mimicking firms are significantly higher as compared to those of the mimicking ones. The results evidence the efficiency of Taiwan stock market to differentiate non-mimicking firms from mimicking ones. 3、The mimicking firms are then subdivided into high-EPS, medium-EPS, and low-EPS groups by five-year average of EPS right before the issuance. The empirical evidence shows that the high-EPS mimicking firms are more similar to non-mimicking firms in terms of pre-issuance conditions, as compared to medium-EPS and low-EPS ones. However, the cumulative abnormal return of high-EPS mimicking group is lowest among the four groups. It indicates that the investors can truly identify the high-EPS firms with stagnant growth from others and deem their issuance of convertible securities as a negative signal. 4、We analysis over-sectionally the financing behavior of the firms issuing convertible security. The paired sample that were selected from the common equity and straight debt sample were examined. The result shows that issuers prefer convertible security issues to common equity when they have lower debt ratio、higher liquidity and gross opportunities. When the firms have better profitability and higher free cash flow(FCF), the issuers prefer convertible security issues to straight debt. The empirical evidence support the hypotheses both of the “backdoor” (Stein 1992) and the “risk-shifting”(Green 1984).
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